Meta mocked for raising “Bob Dylan defense” of torrenting in AI copyright fight
Authors think that Meta’s admitted torrenting of a pirated books data set used to train its AI models is evidence enough to win their copyright fight—which previously hinged on a court ruling that AI training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use.
Moving for summary judgment on a direct copyright infringement claim on Monday in a US district court in California, the authors alleged that “whatever the merits of generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, stealing copyrighted works off the Internet for one’s own benefit has always been unlawful.”
In their filing, the authors accused Meta of brazenly deciding to torrent terabytes of pirated book data after attempts to download pirated books one by one “posed an immense strain on Meta’s networks and proceeded very slowly.”
