Meta Faces Class Action Suit In Copyright Infringement In Training Llama AI

Meta Faces Class Action Suit In Copyright Infringement In Training Llama AI

The company was accused of using Torrents to download 81.7TB of data

Meta is facing a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition in training its Llama artificial intelligence (AI) model.

The case is ongoing, and a court decision on direct infringement is pending. Regardless of the initial outcome, appeals are likely to potentially delay a final judgment for months or years.

Meta (formerly Facebook) was accused of illegally torrenting 81.7TB of data from ‘shadow libraries’ such as Anna's Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen to train AI. In October 2022, it used pirated material.

A senior Al researcher then stated, "I don't think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line here."

Another held, "Using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold. SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they're infringing it.”

However, despite such concerns, in January 2023, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "We need to move this stuff forward and find a way to unblock all this.

Three months later, an employee expressed concern about Meta IP addresses being used for downloading pirated content. He stated, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right,” even as the company tried to conceal its downloading activity.

Meanwhile, other Al companies like OpenAI and Nvidia are facing similar accusations.

In June 2023, OpenAI was sued by novelists, with The New York Times following suit in December.

Nvidia faced a lawsuit for using copyrighted books. Its former employee revealed extensive video scraping for Al’s training.

OpenAI is probing whether DeepSeek illegally obtained data from ChatGPT.