I don't usually like Meta, but here they used that data to produce open weights models available to the public. That sort of thing is what piracy is for so I support it.

Meta did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment and has maintained throughout the litigation that AI training on LibGen was "fair use."

When I upload a single half century old photo to Wikipedia, I have to fill out a relatively complicated form proving that it meets "fair use" standards. Internet Archive got legally fucked for allowing people to read their book scans without restriction for a while. And now these absolute cunts have the gall to defer to "fair use"! I really wonder if the same authors and publishing houses who sued IA will do anything about this.

And they probably never reseeded it afterwards either, the inconsiderate prats

This doesn’t mean that Meta denies using shadow libraries, its argument is that using such data to train its LLM models constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.

Oh wow, I'm very much looking forward to this argument... "We believe pirating the copyrighted commercial works of others en masse to develop our own commercial product constitutes fair use... China bad!"

Of course they didn't seed. Fucking leeches.

Remember when Aaron Swartz tried to do something similar and received multiple life sentences

“Plaintiffs do not plead a single instance in which any part of any book was, in fact, downloaded by a third party from Meta via torrent, much less that Plaintiffs’ books were somehow distributed by Meta,” the company writes.

Another reason to hate Meta, now they're scummy leechers even though they could afford the bandwidth to seed back

That's a lot of Far Side books.

If they don't respect copyright I don't respect it either

And they should pay for every book they stole :)