Piracy lawsuit against Meta could set precedent for torrenting copyrighted works in AI training

A hot potato: Meta is embroiled in a ground-breaking AI lawsuit that could change how courts view copyright law. The case seems open-and-shut from the plaintiffs' view. However, if a judge sees otherwise, it could set a monumental precedent allowing corporations to pirate copyrighted material to train AI systems. In January 2024, a group of writers filed a lawsuit in California against Meta for using their works to train various versions of the Llama large language model. Meta openly admitted to using the Book3 dataset, a well-known 37GB compilation of 195,000 copyrighted books used by developers to train LLMs since 2020. The company defends its actions, citing the Fair Use doctrine. Earlier this year, the court unsealed documents Showing that Meta had used torrenting to gather its AI training data. On Monday, the authors filed for a partial summary judgment in a California U.S. District Court, arguing that Meta's alleged use of pirated data leaves no room for legal ambiguity. The pl ... Read full article.