The plaintiffs are seeking the court’s permission to submit an updated complaint against Meta. Credit: kovop/Shutterstock.

Meta Platforms is currently facing allegations of copyright infringement, as a group of authors claim that the company knowingly used pirated books to train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems, reports Reuters.

In filings made in California federal court, the authors claimed that the pirated books were used with approval from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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The authors said internal Meta communications revealed that the Meta CEO “approved Meta’s use of the LibGen dataset notwithstanding concerns within Meta’s AI executive team (and others at Meta) that LibGen is ‘a dataset we know to be pirated”.

The legal action against Meta in was initiated in 2023 by authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedian Sarah Silverman.

The internal communications at Meta allegedly show that Zuckerberg sanctioned the use of the LibGen dataset despite internal concerns about its legitimacy.

Following the initial legal action, US District Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed claims that Meta’s chatbots generated text that infringed on the authors’ copyrights and that the company had unlawfully removed copyright management information from their books.

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However, the authors contend that the new evidence strengthens their infringement claims and supports the reinstatement of their copyright management information claim, as well as the addition of a computer fraud claim.

The plaintiffs are now seeking the court’s permission to submit an updated complaint, citing new evidence that the tech giant employed the LibGen AI training dataset, known to contain pirated content, and distributed it via peer-to-peer torrents.

During recent hearing, Chhabria agreed to permit the authors to file an amended complaint, but expressed doubts about the strength of the fraud and copyright management information allegations.