ark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has used YouTube’s tries to remove pirated content in order to create its defense for his own company and theri use of data sent
that contains copyrighted e-books, revealing newly released parts from a deposition that he gave last year.
The deposition that Mark Zuckerberg gave is part of a complaint submitted to the court by the plaintiff’s attorneys, related to the AI copyright case Kadrey v Meta. However, this is only one of many cases involving AI companies against IP holders and authors. The largest party of the defendants in those cases are AI companies that claim that training their AI system on copyrighted content is “fair use.” Yet, many of those copyright holders are not on the same page.
Mark Zuckerberg said in his deposition “For example, YouTube, I think, may end up hosting some stuff that people pirate for some period of time, but YouTube is trying to take that stuff down,” adding “And the vast majority of the stuff on YouTube, I would assume, is kind of good and they have the license to do.”
The deposition reveals Zuckerberg’s thinking and opinion on copyrighted content, as well as details about hair use. Yet, it should also be made clear that a full version of the deposition is still not available to the public.
However, from the snippets available from the deposition, we can see that Meta’s actions appear to be defended, especially when it comes to the use of LibGen, e-books that were used to train Meta’s AI, Llama.
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LibGen is a well-known “link aggregator” that offers acces to copyrighted works from numerous publishers including Cengage Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education, being sued numerous times and ordered to shut down for copyright infringement.
In the court filings that were released the past few weeks, Zuckerberg allegedly cleared their rights to use LibGen in order to train at least one of their AI models, ignoring all the concerns regarding their legal implications.
In his deposition, Zuckerberg also claimed that he “hadn’t really heard of” LibGen. Mentioning that “I get that you’re trying to get me to give an opinion of LibGen, which I haven’t really heard of,” also adding “It’s just that I don’t have knowledge of that specific thing.”.
Zuckerberg also explained why the ban on using a data set such as LibGen would be unreasonable. “So would I want to have a policy against people using YouTube because some of the content may be copyrighted? No,” he added. “[T]here are cases where having such a blanket ban might not be the right thing to do.”
In the deposition, he also added “You know, [if there’s] someone who’s providing a website and they’re intentionally trying to violate people’s rights … obviously it’s something that we would want to be cautious about or careful about how we engaged with it or maybe even prevent our teams from engaging with it,”.
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