Meta insists pirating books to train AI was fair use

Meta and others used pirated versions of copyrighted books to train AI models and now face a class-action brought by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden. A Californian court concluded last year that using pirated books to train the Llama LLM qualified as fair use, but Meta still faces claims it infringed copyright by downloading and sharing those books via BitTorrent.

The company obtained the books from so-called shadow libraries using aggregators such as Anna’s Archive, and the nature of BitTorrent transfers meant it was both downloading and uploading content for other users.

United States, California

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