The Kadrey Plaintiffs, represented by David Boies’ law firm, filed its reply in support of their own motion for partial summary judgment on the issue of Meta’s alleged infringement in engaging in putatively illegal file sharing (via torrenting) of “shadow libraries” consisting of millions of copies of “pirated books.”
The Kadrey brief is well-written and does a respectable job in advancing its positions.
The Allegedly Illegal File Sharing of Pirated Books Datasets of Millions of Books
If you haven’t followed this case closely (you should), a major issue involves Meta’s decision, apparently approved by Mark Zuckerberg (aka “MZ”) himself, to get copies of books from the controversial Library Genesis dataset by torrenting them due to their file size, which also apparently required them to “seed” the same pirated book files for others online to acquire as well via torrenting. So, a big part of the parties’ dispute on summary judgment is whether Judge Chhabria should rule that Meta’s unauthorized torrenting of the books, which also involved “seeding” of copies of the books for others outside of Meta to download (although I think there’s some dispute over how many books of plaintiffs others downloaded from this seeding), should be deemed copyright infringement separate from the issue of Meta’s training of the AI model. See below.
What’s the use?
The brief also opposes Meta’s motion for summary judgment on fair use to train its AI model. The parties disagree on whether the file sharing of the books datasets should be considered a separate use for fair use analysis. The Kadrey plaintiffs argue it should–and it constitutes copyright infringement as a matter of law. Meta, by contrast, believes the file sharing of the controversial books dataset should be treated as a part of its AI training–and how it got the book copies should not weigh against fair use, which does not require “good faith.”
Defining the use will be a major issue for Judge Chhabria to decide.
Excerpts from Kadrey’s brief:
DOWNLOAD KADREY’S BRIEF BELOW
