Ex-Meta Researcher Torrented Pirated Books, Deleted It 'Due to Litigation'

Discussion overview

The thread mostly rejects the easy question of whether ordinary people have ever downloaded unauthorized media. Readers instead focus on the AI-industry double standard: a student copying one textbook can face legal risk, while a company can allegedly ingest a vast pirate library to build a commercially valuable model and treat any eventual penalty as a business expense. For them, the troubling AI issue is not only copyright doctrine but power: frontier-model training turns mass acquisition of books into an input cost, while authors and smaller users carry the enforcement risk.

Several commenters distinguish the legality of training from the legality of obtaining the corpus. They note that a court has found Llama training on books to be fair use, but argue that this does not erase questions about torrenting, possible organizational knowledge, or deletion of material amid litigation. Others point out that even licensed books would not settle the broader objection that models can imitate authors’ voices, so buying data may solve procurement liability without solving the cultural or economic conflict. The conversation also treats missing logs and deleted copies as especially corrosive: if companies can discard damaging evidence, discovery becomes too weak to test whether AI labs followed the rules they publicly invoke.

Points of disagreement

The sharp dispute is whether the scandal is ordinary piracy rhetoric being selectively aimed at AI, or evidence that model builders receive a separate legal standard. Defenders of the narrower view stress that training itself has already received a fair-use ruling and that licensing would not end objections to stylistic imitation. Critics answer that fair use for training does not legitimize allegedly unlawful acquisition or evidence deletion, particularly when a corporation can absorb penalties that would crush an individual.