Meta Pirated and Seeded Porn for Years to Train AI, Lawsuit Says
upstart writes:
Lawsuit: Meta may have seeded porn to minors while hiding piracy for AI training:
Porn sites may have blown up Meta's key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries" to train its AI models.
Meta has defeated most of the authors' claims and claimed there is no proof that Meta ever uploaded pirated data through seeding or leeching on the BitTorrent network used to download training data. But authors still have a chance to prove that Meta may have profited off its massive piracy, and a new lawsuit filed by adult sites last week appears to contain evidence that could help authors win their fight, TorrentFreak reported.
The new lawsuit was filed last Friday in a US district court in California by Strike 3 Holdings-which says it attracts "over 25 million monthly visitors" to sites that serve as "ethical sources" for adult videos that "are famous for redefining adult content with Hollywood style and quality."
After authors revealed Meta's torrenting, Strike 3 Holdings checked its proprietary BitTorrent-tracking tools designed to detect infringement of its videos and alleged that the company found evidence that Meta has been torrenting and seeding its copyrighted content for years-since at least 2018. Some of the IP addresses were clearly registered to Meta, while others appeared to be "hidden," and at least one was linked to a Meta employee, the filing said.
According to Strike 3 Holdings, Meta "willfully and intentionally" infringed "at least 2,396 movies" as part of a strategy to download terabytes of data as fast as possible by seeding popular high-quality porn. Supposedly, Meta continued seeding the content "sometimes for days, weeks, or even months" after downloading them, and these movies may also have been secretly used to train Meta's AI models, Strike 3 Holdings alleged.
The porn site operator explained to the court that BitTorrent's protocol establishes a "tit-for-tat" mechanism that "rewards users who distribute the most desired content." It alleged that Meta took advantage of this system by "often" pirating adult videos that are "often within the most infringed files on BitTorrent websites" on "the very same day the motion pictures are released."
These tactics allegedly gave Meta several advantages, making it harder for Strike 3 Holdings' sites to compete, including potentially distributing the videos to minors for free without age checks in states that now require them.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.