Meta tells court BitTorrent uploads were fair use in authors' lawsuit
Mar 7th 2026
Meta told a federal judge that unavoidable BitTorrent uploads while downloading pirated book datasets were part of its fair use LLM training defense, prompting authors to challenge the late filing.
- Authors sued Meta in 2023 alleging it downloaded and shared pirated books to train the Llama model.
- A court previously found using pirated books for training qualified as fair use but left upload-based infringement claims unresolved.
- Meta now argues uploading during BitTorrent downloads was automatic and necessary because the datasets were only available in bulk via torrents.
- The authors objected that Meta raised this defense late and asked the judge to reject the new argument under discovery rules.
- Meta says the defense was disclosed earlier and points to author depositions where they admitted they saw no model outputs that reproduce their books.
- Judge Vince Chhabria will decide whether to allow this 'fair use by technical necessity' defense, a ruling that could shape future AI training litigation.