Josh Hawley Pulls Up Meta Employee Chat Logs In Front Of Congress Showing 'Pirating' Scheme

Forbes Breaking News

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) showed Meta employee chat logs showing Meta employees may have been using pirated materials to train their artificial intelligence models.

Transcript

00:00Question or two about some of the evidence. We talked about Meta engineers saying that they

00:06realized what they were doing was crossing an ethical line, that they felt they shouldn't

00:10be doing it, but they had to cut some corners. Let me just ask you, did Meta ever tried to

00:15hide what it was doing? Did it try to hide the fact that it was pirating these works?

00:20What the documents show is that in 2024, when Meta began to use Anna's archive,

00:25it decided intentionally to not use its own servers and instead to go through Amazon web

00:32services in order to ensure that the seeding, the sharing of pirated works would not be traced

00:41back to Meta's own IP. It doesn't sound to me like a company and executives that think what they're

00:47doing is above board. It sounds like a company that thinks that what they're doing is probably

00:52illegal in some manner, but they want to go on doing it anyway. Let me just show you a couple

00:56of documents, help us understand what we're seeing here. These are more Meta engineers now,

01:01again, working on AI. We've got the first one, Nikolai, who says, not sure we can use Meta's IPs

01:08to load through torrent's pirate content. Ha ha. I emphasize, these are their documents. I mean,

01:17for all of Professor Lee's, and again, I appreciate Professor Lee making these arguments, but for all

01:20Professor Lee's comments that we're not sure if it's really pirated or not, they thought so.

01:26This is Meta. Meta thought so. The next person says, the next employee, I'm curious to start

01:31looking at some samples, but I feel like we should get some clarity on what's allowed and how. Smiling

01:35emoji. Nikolai again, ha ha, yeah, I think torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right.

01:42I mean, what are we looking at here, Mr. Pritt? I mean, does this, is this an attempt to be above

01:47board and forthcoming and, you know, they think everything's fine?

01:51I think that is a very difficult conclusion to draw from these documents. And with all due respect

01:56to Professor Lee, as I am still litigating the case against Meta on behalf of a group of authors,

02:05Judge Chawbery in that case specifically declined to decide whether Meta's piracy, what it has engaged

02:12in, in terms of the downloading, the making available, the making additional copies, and then sending those

02:19copies over 40 terabytes of data to other individuals, is in fact fair use. And no court, including the

02:27Supreme Court, has ever held that rank piracy is somehow fair use. And instead, the Supreme Court case law,

02:38law, the still law of the land says that fair use presupposes good faith and fair dealing.

02:46I will leave it to you whether or not you think any of these documents shows good faith and fair

02:51dealing. Let's just look at one other document and ask ourselves if this looks like good faith and

02:57fair dealing. More Meta employees, more AI engineers. Frank, can you clarify why we can't use Facebook

03:05infra internal for this again? Frank Zhang replies, we've got to avoid the risk of tracing back the

03:11seeder from a Facebook server. And he clarifies, avoid the risk of tracing back the seeder download

03:17are from Facebook servers. So here we have Meta employees saying they know they're pirating,

03:26they think it's ethically wrong, they think it's illegal, and they are actively avoiding trying to

03:32create a paper trail. They're trying to hide it. I mean, that doesn't sound like fair use to me.

03:37Does it sound like fair use to you, Professor Lee? I mean, do you think this is fair use?

03:41I would just say I agree with Judge Chabria's approach. The distribution claim is still alive

03:47in the case. And this aspect of the torrenting may well be infringement and not fair use.

03:54I'll just say this. If this isn't infringement, Congress needs to do something.

03:57I mean, if the answer is that the biggest corporation in the world worth trillions of

04:03dollars can come take an individual author's work like Mr. Baldacci, lie about it, hide it,

04:09profit off of it, and there's nothing our law does about that, we need to change the law.

04:14And if nothing else comes out of this hearing today, I hope that's it. And I hope that this

04:17is motivation to this body that we need to be paying attention to what's going on here.

04:23Mr. Baldacci, you said you'd rather live in a different planet if there was AI that could,

04:26that could write your books. I'm sure that that will never happen. They'll never write

04:30your books. I want to live on a different planet if, if this can go on and it's perfectly legal.

04:36We've got to do something about this.

04:40Let me just ask you, Mr. Pritt, finally, what about Mark Zuckerberg and all of this? I mean,

04:43do we think that Zuckerberg knew about this, approved this? I mean, what's the evidence suggest?

04:49Certainly the documents that have become public in the case explain that the decision whether or not to

04:58use library genesis, which is a notorious illicit marketplace, for example,

05:03for actual training as opposed to exploration was escalated to Mark Zuckerberg.

05:11I think the judge said something to this effect. Let's just look here if we've got it.

05:15That, in fact, Zuckerberg was asked about it. There it is. In the spring of 2023,

05:23after failing to acquire licenses and following escalation up to Zuckerberg,

05:28Meta decided to just use the works acquired from a torrenting platform as training data.

05:34So they just did it anyway. They just, yeah, you know, do it anyway. Forget it. Don't pay Mr. Baldacci.

05:38Don't pay anybody. It costs too much. A lot cheaper to take it for free and then make billions

05:44of dollars off of it. Listen, I'll just conclude with this. I want to thank all the witnesses for

05:49their testimony. And Senator Welch, if you have more questions, Senator Durbin, I'm happy to let

05:54you ask those. For my part, I just want to say, I think that this is a moral issue as much as

05:58anything else. I think this is an issue about who are we going to be as a country? Are we going to be a

06:03country, as it's written into our constitution, where we protect the rights of our citizens? It's part of

06:07what makes us Americans. And we welcome the creative genius of people like Mr. Baldacci and

06:11the marvelous diversity of imagination and viewpoints and perspectives that has come to

06:18characterize our country. Are we going to protect that? Are we going to allow a few mega corporations

06:23to vacuum it all up, digest it, and make billions of dollars in profits, maybe trillions, and pay

06:30nobody for it? That's not America. That's not our country. It never has been. Listen, I'm all for the

06:35free market. I'm glad Mark Zuckerberg can make his billions. That's fine. But not by running over

06:39people like Mr. Baldacci or anybody else or any young author who's trying to get a start or any

06:44other person, creative, non-creative, or just a working guy who puts something on Facebook.

06:50Why should all his stuff get taken? I just think that's wrong. I think it's morally wrong. I think,

06:56frankly, it's not consonant with our principles as Americans. And I think we can and should do better

07:02than that. Can I, Senator Welch, Senator Durbin? I want to thank again the witnesses for being here.

07:08Thanks to each of you. I know you had to travel far for this. And thank you for, again, for

07:13accommodating our schedule. Thanks to everyone who's been here today. And with that, we'll stand

07:17adjourned. Great. Thank you.

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