Where are the Prosecutions?

I do not support enforcing copyright violations with criminal prosecutions, but in Zuckerberg's case, I'll make an exception
It seems that the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ knowingly and deliberately used pirated works to train its LLM artificial intelligence program.

I'm not particularly surprised.  Zuckerberg has been a serial (to the point of being surreal) law breaker.

I rather think that the Chinese breakthroughs, which show the Eliza programs of Zuckerberg and Altman to irrelevant, make much of the effort here wasted, but I am grateful for this quote from a newly released email, "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right." 

Newly unsealed emails allegedly provide the "most damning evidence" yet against Meta in a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books.

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen," the authors' court filing said. And "Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen."

"The magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme is astonishing," the authors' filing alleged, insisting that "vastly smaller acts of data piracy—just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated—have resulted in Judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation."

Don't these lawyers understand?  Mark Zuckerberg is worth $237,000,000,000.00.

In the USA, people with that much money do not get prosecuted.

Why do these lawyers hate America? 

………

Emails discussing torrenting prove that Meta knew it was "illegal," authors alleged. And [Meta research engineer Nikolay] Bashlykov's warnings seemingly landed on deaf ears, with authors alleging that evidence showed Meta chose to instead hide its torrenting as best it could while downloading and seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April 2024.

………

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as being in "stealth mode." Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again because the new facts allegedly "contradict prior deposition testimony."

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the "decision to use LibGen occurred" after "a prior escalation to MZ," authors alleged.

Yeah.  Sounds like a conspiracy to lie during depositions.  It came from the top.

Book him, Danno, criminal conspiracy to violate copyright.  (Not as catchy as, "Book him, Danno, Murder 1," but I'll take it.)