“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, even though internal Meta records show every relevant decision-maker at Meta, up to and including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, knows LibGen is the ‘dataset we know. will be hijacked,'” the plaintiffs said in the motion. (Originally filed at the end of 2024, the motion is a request to file a third amended complaint.) In addition to the plaintiff’s brief, another unredacted file in response to the message Chhabria-Meta opposition to the motion to file an amended complaint. It said the author’s attempt to add additional claims to the case was an “eleventh-hour gambit based on a false and inflammatory premise” and denied that Meta was waiting to reveal important information in discovery. However, Meta argued that it was first revealed to the plaintiffs who used the LibGen dataset in July 2024. (Because much of the discovery material remains confidential, it is difficult for WIRED to confirm this claim.) Meta’s argument rests on the claim that the plaintiffs. was aware of the use of LibGen and should not be given additional time to file a third amended claim when they have enough time to do so before the invention ends in December. 2024. “Plaintiffs were aware of Meta’s downloads and use of LibGen and other alleged ‘shadow libraries’ since at least mid-July 2024,” the tech giant’s lawyer said. including Meta’s claims that it allegedly used the author’s work to train AI in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a US law enacted in 1998 to prevent people from selling or duplicating copyrighted works on the internet. At the time, the judge agreed with Meta’s stance that the plaintiff had not provided enough evidence to prove that the company had removed what it called “copyright management information,” like the name of the author and the title of the work. The plaintiff should be allowed to amend their complaint, alleging that the information Meta revealed is evidence that the DMCA claim is warranted. He also said the discovery process has uncovered grounds to add new charges. “Meta, through a company representative who testified on November 20, 2024, has now admitted under oath to uploading pirated files (aka ‘seeding’) containing the Plaintiff’s work on a ‘torrent’ site,” the motion said. (Seeding is when a torrent file is then shared with other friends after the download is complete.) “This torrent activity makes Meta itself a distributor of the same pirated copyright material that is also downloaded for use in commercially available AI models,” one The recently unredacted document claims that Meta, in other words, is not only using copyrighted material without permission but also distributing 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 library” in the world. In 2015, a New York judge ordered a preliminary injunction against the site, a measure designed to temporarily close the archive, but the anonymous administrator simply switched the domain. In September 2024, the New York judge another ordered LibGen to pay $30 million to rights holders for copyright infringement, despite not knowing who actually operated the piracy center. In the same order, Chhabria warned the tech giant about the huge number of redaction requests in the future: “If Meta again sends unreasonable sealing requests, all materials will be unsealed,” he wrote.
