“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of hidden data sets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, even though Meta’s internal records show all relevant decision-makers at Meta, including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg knew that LibGen was ‘a data set that we know is hacked,’” the plaintiffs allege in this motion. (The motion, originally filed in late 2024, is a request to file a third amended complaint.)
In addition to the plaintiffs’ briefs, another filing was not drafted in response to Chhabria’s order: Meta’s opposition to the motion to file an amended complaint. He maintains that the authors’ attempts to add additional claims to the case are a “last-minute gambit based on a false and inflammatory premise” and denies that Meta waited to reveal information crucial to the discovery. Instead, Meta argues that it first disclosed to plaintiffs that it used a LibGen data set in July 2024 (because much of the discovery materials remain confidential, WIRED finds it difficult to confirm that claim).
Meta’s argument hinges on its claim that the plaintiffs already knew about LibGen’s use and should not be given additional time to file a third amended claim when they had enough time to do so before discovery ended in December 2024. “Plaintiffs have known about Meta’s downloading and use of LibGen and other alleged ‘shadow libraries’ since at least mid-July 2024,” the tech giant’s lawyers said. argue.
In November 2023, Chhabria granted 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 violated the Millennium Copyright Act. Digital, a US law introduced in 1998 to prevent people from selling or duplicating. works protected by copyright on the Internet. At that time, the judge agreed with Meta’s position that the plaintiffs had not provided sufficient evidence to show that the company had removed what is known as “copyright management information,” such as the author’s name and the title of the work.
The unredacted documents argue that the plaintiffs should be allowed to amend their complaint, claiming that the information revealed by Meta is evidence that the DMCA claim was justified. They also say the discovery process has uncovered reasons to add new allegations. “Meta, through a corporate representative who testified on November 20, 2024, has now admitted under oath to uploading (also known as ‘seeding’) pirated files containing plaintiffs’ works to torrent sites,” the lawsuit alleges. motion. (Seeding is when files downloaded in torrents are shared with other peers after they have finished downloading.)
“This torrent activity turned Meta into a distributor of the same pirated copyrighted material that it was also downloading for use in its commercially available AI models,” states one of the newly unredacted documents, alleging that Meta, in other In other words, he had not simply used copyrighted material without permission, but also disseminated it.
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 tidy a preliminary injunction against the site, a move designed in theory to temporarily shut down the archive, but its anonymous administrators simply changed its domain. In September 2024, another New York judge tidy LibGen will pay $30 million to rights holders for infringing its copyright, despite not knowing who actually operates the piracy hub.
The Meta discovery problems in this case are not over either. In the same vein, Chhabria warned the tech giant against any overly broad redaction requests in the future: “If Meta resubmits an unreasonably broad sealing request, all materials will simply be unsealed,” he wrote.