GoKawiilLooks like Meta is hoping the recent Supreme Court ruling that found Internet service providers aren’t liable for piracy on their networks will help the social media giant dodge liability claims over its torrenting of AI training data.
Last week, Meta filed a statement in a lawsuit that alleged that Meta should be liable under copyright law for contributory infringement simply because the company knows how torrenting works. By seeding perhaps 80 terabytes of pirated works, the company allegedly knew it was inducing infringement by allowing uploads to help speed up its downloads, the plaintiffs, Entrepreneur Media, argued.
This contributory infringement claim is much easier to prove than a separate claim raised in a class action filed by book authors in Kadrey v. Meta, which alleged that Meta’s torrenting meant it was liable for a “distribution” claim of direct copyright infringement. TorrentFreak noted that the authors’ claim required evidence that Meta torrented an entire work, whereas the contributory infringement claim only depends on proving that Meta facilitated torrent transfers.
Since torrenting depends on swarms of users sharing fragments of files, authors in the class action were expected to struggle to show any of the disputed works were seeded in full. That’s why, for Meta, the contributory infringement claim’s survival could be damning, as a judge recently ruled that it can be added to the class action case, too.
Meta’s strategy to avoid losing both cases now appears to hinge at least partly on courts agreeing that the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Cox case drew a bright red line in a way that benefits Meta when clarifying the standards for contributory infringement. In its statement, Meta said it would soon file a supplemental brief explaining why the ruling would support its motion to dismiss the Entrepreneur Media case.