Court Docs Reveal Meta Illegally Torrented 81.7TB of Pirated Books for AI Training
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February 9, 2025 – Unsealed court documents from Kadrey v. Meta reveal that Meta (formerly Facebook) illegally downloaded 81.7 terabytes of copyrighted books, research papers, and academic content from "shadow libraries" like Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen to train its artificial intelligence models.
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The documents, made public on February 5, 2024, include internal communications where some Meta employees expressed ethical concerns. A senior AI researcher warned, “I don’t think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line there.” Another researcher compared the sites to “PirateBay” and said using them should be “beyond our ethical threshold.”
Despite these warnings, Meta’s leadership moved forward. In January 2023, CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended a meeting—largely redacted in court filings—where he urged action, saying, “We need to move this stuff forward” and “find a way to unblock all of this.”
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By April 2023, Meta employees openly discussed using VPNs to mask their activities and conceal the company’s IP addresses while torrenting copyrighted content. Internal messages also show employees acknowledging the legal risks. One even joked, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😂.” Others suggested involving Meta’s lawyers in case their actions were discovered.
The court filings raise serious ethical and legal questions about Meta’s data acquisition methods. If proven in court, the allegations could result in significant legal consequences, including copyright infringement claims from publishers and authors.
Meta has not yet publicly responded to the unsealed documents.
Source: TorrentFreak
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