Unsealed court documents from February 5th, 2024, in Kadrey v. Meta show Meta (formerly Facebook) illegally torrented 81.7TB of data from "shadow libraries" such as Anna's Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen to train Meta artificial intelligence.
Highlights include:
- A senior AI research at Meta says, "I don't think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line there."
- Another AI researcher says, "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 protectec by copyright and they're infringing it".
- In January 2023, Mark Zuckerberg attends a meeting which is heavily redacted in court documents. However, he says "we need to this move this stuff forward" and "we need to find a way to unblock all of this".
- Fast forward to April, 2023, Meta employees discuss using a VPN to conceal Meta IP address ranges when torrenting data. Meta employees also discuss the need to involve lawyers if something goes astray. The unredacted court records show a Meta employee saying, "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right 😂".
