Judge Suggests Pirate Libraries Could Benefit from Meta’s 80TB Book Torrenting Activities

Meta faces potential challenges in a copyright infringement case concerning its use of torrenting to download copyrighted material from shadow libraries. Judge Chhabria indicated that if evidence shows Meta’s actions financially supported these unauthorized libraries, it could negatively impact Meta’s standing. Historically, peer-to-peer file-sharing cases often result in rulings against the infringing parties, which complicates Meta’s position, especially since some libraries it accessed have been found liable for infringement. However, there is currently a lack of evidence from authors demonstrating that Meta’s downloading helped these pirate libraries. Chhabria also remarked on the transformative nature of Meta’s use of the downloaded materials for training its AI model, Llama, asserting that this purpose justifies the downloading activity as well. Ultimately, authors only discovered Meta’s torrenting practices through legal processes, leaving room for more evidence to emerge regarding its contributions to the BitTorrent network.

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