During a lawsuit over copyright infringement, the owners of Facebook, Instagram and Threads have been accused of using pirated material to train their artificial intelligence tools. The case of Kadrey vs. Meta is one of continuing lawsuits accusing Meta of using copyrighted works without permission to train its AI models. The company defends its action under the American principle of fair use, arguing that the use of protected works to create something new is legal, as long as it is sufficiently transformative.
New developments in the case reveal allegations that Mark Zuckerberg personally gave Meta engineers permission to use copyrighted material that had been acquired illegally for the purpose of training their artificial intelligence models known as Llama AI.
According to the plaintiffs, the company used the digital library Library Genesis (LibGen), which has been accused multiple times of providing copyrighted content for free and illegally. The accusation claims that, despite protests from company employees and executives, Zuckerberg insisted on using this data and gave the green light for it to be used to “feed” his AI models, without giving importance to the possible legal ramifications.
The lawsuit adds that “this discovery suggests that Meta strips copyright information not only for training purposes, but also to conceal its copyright infringement, because stripping copyrighted works prevents Llama IA from issuing copyright information that could alert application users and the public to Meta’s infringement.”
These accusations, if proven true, could hinder Meta’s legal position and would be key to winning the lawsuit, which would also establish important legal precedents on the use of generative artificial intelligence. So far, Meta has not commented publicly on this situation.
Via: TechCrunch