Mark Zuckerberg named in lawsuit over Meta’s use of pirated books for AI training

A group of authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman, alleged in a court filing that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved "Meta's torrenting and processing of pirated copyrighted works" to train the company's AI models.

The California filing, which was made public on Wednesday, claims that Zuckerberg supported the use of the LibGen dataset, an archive that originated in Russia and contains a library of pirated books, to train its Llama AI. In a document submitted to the court, Meta admitted that it "removed [ed] all the copyright paragraphs from the beginning and the end" of scientific journal articles, Engadget reported. The suit alleges that this was explicitly done to hide the fact that Meta was using copyrighted materials. 

Clearly, Meta did not want this information to be made public. The Guardian reported that the filing stated: "Media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, may undermine our negotiating position with regulators."

All the while, Meta has been integrating Llama AI further into its apps and services.

This comes just a few days after Zuckerberg announced that he is replacing fact-checkers with Community Notes, lifting prohibitions against some discriminatory and hateful rhetoric on its platforms, and pushing more political content on Instagram and Threads.