Meta says BitTorrent uploads were part of fair use in Llama book lawsuit
Mar 10th 2026
Meta admits it obtained pirated books via BitTorrent and says any uploads were unavoidable parts of bulk downloads used to train Llama, while authors allege direct copyright infringement and dispute when Meta disclosed this defense; a judge will now rule on whether the defense can proceed.
- Meta used pirated books from shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive to train its Llama models.
- A California court previously found that using pirated books for model training qualified as fair use.
- Authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden brought a class-action alleging Meta downloaded and uploaded their works via BitTorrent.
- Meta argues any uploading was inherent to torrent downloads and was necessary to obtain datasets in bulk for transformative use.
- Authors say Meta disclosed the upload-based fair use defense late and tried to limit discovery, while Meta says it raised the defense earlier in court filings.
- Judge Vince Chhabria will decide whether to allow the uploading defense, a ruling that could affect other AI copyright cases.