In one of the AI lawsuits faced by Meta, the company stands accused of distributing pirated books. The authors who filed the class-action lawsuit allege that Meta shared books from the shadow library LibGen with third parties via BitTorrent. Meta, however, says that it took precautions to prevent ‘seeding’ content. In addition, the company clarifies that there is nothing ‘independently illegal’ about torrenting.
It’s a solid defense, since the lawsuit’s about the sharing of the books. The metadata of the torrents isn’t part of the relevant IP, and how they used the content they downloaded is a separate issue.