Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement

5 hours ago

Meta and Mark Zuckerberg sued by five publishers and author Scott Turow for allegedly illegally copying millions of books and articles to train AI systems like Llama.
Plaintiffs claim Meta torrented copyrighted materials from pirate sites and scraped the internet without authorization, engaging in massive copyright infringement.
Meta argues AI training on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use, citing past court rulings that dismissed similar author lawsuits.
The new lawsuit alleges Meta deliberately circumvented copyright protections, considered but abandoned licensing deals at Zuckerberg's instruction to rely on fair use.
Meta employees internally flagged legal risks of using pirated datasets like LibGen, but executives authorized torrenting hundreds of millions of publications.
The suit claims Meta's AI generates substitutes for copyrighted works, including verbatim copies and derivatives, mimicking specific authors' styles.

Hasty Briefsbeta