Plaintiffs allege that former researcher Stephen Roller acquired the Books3 dataset via BitTorrent during his employment and later erased his personal copy because of the pending lawsuit. Meta pushed back against the claims, arguing that Roller maintained the files on his personal computer and deleted them merely because they were no longer needed. Plaintiffs are also pursuing records regarding an internal Google Drive folder called "ML Books" after internal discussions revealed an employee worrying about being fired for sharing a pirated book. Meta maintains that these additional evidentiary requests are invalid because the formal discovery deadline has expired.
Key points
The methods Meta used to source training materials remain under intense scrutiny despite…: The methods Meta used to source training materials remain under intense scrutiny despite a prior court ruling protecting AI training as fair use.
Plaintiffs argue that circulating pirated books for internal company uses outside AI mode…: Plaintiffs argue that circulating pirated books for internal company uses outside AI model training weakens Meta's fair use defense.
Meta contends the former researcher's actions were personal and asserts that new document…: Meta contends the former researcher's actions were personal and asserts that new document demands arrived after the formal discovery period closed.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
In a series of lawsuits in California federal court, Meta is being sued over the use of pirated books to train its Llama AI models.
The lawsuits are separate, but Judge Vince Chhabria handles them together. The plaintiffs include authors such as Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and publishers such as Entrepreneur Media and Chicken Soup for the Soul.
In August, Meta told Entrepreneur that it did not believe it had obtained the pirated Books3 dataset through BitTorrent. Books3 is a collection of nearly 200,000 books, taken from the library of the private torrent tracker Bibliotik.
However, recent deposition testimony from a former Meta researcher tells a different story, according to the rightsholders.
Books3 Torrenting Testimony
In a joint status report filed with Meta on Tuesday, the rightsholders say that Stephen Roller admitted during a deposition last week that he torrented Books3 and knowingly distributed it. Roller worked at Meta between 2017 and 2023, and the download took place during that period, they say.
Roller didn’t recall exactly when he acquired the dataset, the plaintiffs note. He did acknowledge that…
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