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“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, despite internal Meta records showing every relevant decision-maker at Meta, right down to its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, knew that LibGen was “a data set that we know is hacked,” the plaintiffs allege in this motion. (Originally filed in late 2024, the motion is a request to file a third amended complaint.)
In addition to the plaintiff’s briefs, another file was not drafted in response to Chhabria-Meta’s order. opposition to the motion to file an amended complaint. He argues that the plaintiffs’ attempts to add additional claims to the case are an “eleventh-hour gambit based on a false and inflammatory premise” and denies that Meta expected to reveal crucial information in discovery. Instead, Meta claims that it first disclosed to the plaintiff that it used a LibGen data set in July 2024. (Because most discovery materials remain confidential, it is difficult for WIRED to confirm this claim).
Meta’s argument rests on its claim that the plaintiffs already knew about LibGen’s use and should not have been granted additional time to file a third amended complaint when they had sufficient time to do so before discovery. ends in December 2024. “The plaintiff knew about the download of Meta and the use of LibGen and other alleged ‘shadow libraries’ from at least mid-July 2024,” the technological giant. lawyers to argue.
In November 2023, Chhabria agreed to Meta’s motion to dismiss some of the lawsuit’s claims, including its claim that Meta’s alleged use of the authors’ work to train AI infringed Digital Millennium Copyright Acta US law introduced in 1998 to prevent people from selling or duplicating copyrighted works on the Internet. At the time, the judge agreed with Meta’s position that the plaintiffs did not provide sufficient evidence to prove that the company had removed what is known as “copyright management information”, such as the name of the author and the title of the work
The unredacted documents argue that the plaintiff should be allowed to amend his complaint, stating that the information that Meta has revealed is evidence that the DMCA claim has been justified. They also say the discovery process uncovered reasons to add new allegations. “Meta, through a corporate representative who testified on November 20, 2024, has now admitted under oath to uploading (aka ‘seeding’) pirated files containing the Actors’ works on ‘torrent’ sites,” the motion says. (Seeding is when torrented files are then shared with other peers after they finish downloading.)
“This torrenting activity turned Meta itself into a distributor of the same copyrighted pirated material that it also downloaded for use in its commercially available AI models,” one of the recently unredacted documents states that Meta, among other words, he had none. just used copyrighted material without permission, but also disseminated.
LibGen, an archive of books uploaded to the Internet that originated in Russia around 2008, is one of the largest and most controversial “shadow libraries” in the world. In 2015, a New York judge ordered a preliminary prejudice against the site, a measure designed in theory to temporarily close the archive, but its anonymous administrators only changed its domain. In September 2024, another New York judge ordered LibGen will pay $30 million to rights holders for copyright infringement, despite not knowing who actually operates the piracy center.
Meta’s discovery woes for this case aren’t over yet. In the same vein, Chhabria warned the tech giant against any overly broad redaction requests in the future: “If Meta again requests an unreasonably broad sealing, all materials will simply be cleared,” he wrote.
