Over the past two years, rightsholders of all kinds have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models.
Most of these cases allege that AI developers used copyrighted works to train LLMs without first obtaining authorization.
Meta is among a long list of companies now being sued for this allegedly infringing activity. This includes a class action lawsuit filed by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, which accused Meta of using libraries of pirated books as training material.
Court Dismisses AI Training Claims
Last summer, Meta scored a key victory in this case, as the court concluded that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM qualified as fair use, based on the arguments presented in this case. This was a bittersweet victory, however, as Meta remained on the hook for downloading and sharing the books via BitTorrent.
By downloading books from shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive, Meta relied on BitTorrent transfers. In addition to downloading content, these typically upload data to others as well. According to the authors, this means that Meta was engaged in widespread and direct copyright infringement.
In recent months, the lawsuit continued based on this remaining direct copyright infringement claim. While this was unfolding, the authors’ legal team also ‘discovered’ a new claim
Authors Pivot to Seeding Claim
Last December, the authors, through their attorneys, requested leave to file a fourth amended complaint. Specifically, they want to add a contributory copyright infringement claim, alleging that Meta facilitated third-party copyright infringement by seeding pirated books to others.
While the BitTorrent angle is not new, the authors previously only included a ‘distribution’ claim based on direct copyright infringement. This claim has a higher evidence standard, as it typically requires evidence that the infringer shares a whole work with a third party.
Since BitTorrent transfers break up files into smaller chunks before they are shared, it might be difficult to prove that a whole work is shared. However, the same transfers can be evidence that an infringer facilitated torrent transfers to third parties.
Anna’s Archive torrents (illustrative)
Court Grants BitTorrent Pivot, Despite Doubletalk
This week, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria granted the motion, but made little effort to hide his frustration with how plaintiffs’ counsel handled it.
The judge acknowledged that the contributory infringement claim could and should have been added back in November 2024, when the authors amended their complaint to include the distribution claim. After all, both claims arise from the same factual allegations about Meta’s torrenting activity.
“The lawyers for the named plaintiffs have no excuse for neglecting to add a contributory infringement claim based on these allegations back in November 2024,” Judge Chhabria wrote.
The lawyers of the book authors claimed that the delay was the result of newly produced evidence that had “crystallized” their understanding of Meta’s uploading activity. However, that did not impress the judge.
He called it a “lame excuse” and “a bunch of doubletalk,” noting that if the missing discovery truly prevented the contributory claim from being added in November 2024, the same logic would have prevented the distribution claim from being added at that time as well.
“Rather than blaming Meta for producing discovery late, the plaintiffs’ lawyers should have been candid with the Court, explaining that they missed an issue in a case of first impression..,” the order reads.
Lame excuse…
Judge Chhabria went further, noting that the authors’ law firm, Boies Schiller, showed “an ongoing pattern” of distracting from its own mistakes by attacking Meta. He pointed specifically to the dispute over when Meta disclosed its fair use defense to the distribution claim, which we covered here recently, characterizing it as a false distraction.
“The lawyers for the plaintiffs seem so intent on bashing Meta that they are unable to exercise proper judgment about how to represent the interests of their clients and the proposed class members,” the order reads.
Counsel “Lucked Into” a Pass
Despite the criticism, Chhabria granted the motion. The judge anticipated the obvious question from readers of his order.
“By now, the reader might be thinking, ‘Wait a minute, you started off saying that the motion to amend the complaint was difficult. It seems like an easy deny to me,'” Chhabria wrote.
Wait a Minute…
The primary reason to grant the motion is the risk to the other potential members of the class action. If the contributory infringement claim were excluded and the class later lost on the distribution claim at trial, those class members could potentially be barred from ever bringing the contributory claim separately.
A second factor also made the decision easier. Meta has separately requested the court to align the schedule in this case with a separate but similar lawsuit filed by Entrepreneur Media. This case covers a similar contributory infringement claim and shares discovery the authors’ lawsuit. Granting the motion to amend, therefore, adds little practical burden to Meta.
However, the judge stresses that this is the result of luck, rather than the skill of the authors’ counsel.
“Plaintiffs’ counsel has lucked into a situation where Meta will not be meaningfully prejudiced by the failure to add a contributory infringement claim back in November 2024,” Chhabria wrote.
The authors’ motion to open the class discovery process was denied. That will only be considered if the named plaintiffs survive the next round of summary judgment on both the distribution and contributory infringement claims.
For now, the case moves forward with a fourth amended complaint, three new loan-out companies added as named plaintiffs, and a growing list of BitTorrent-related claims for Judge Chhabria to resolve.
—
A copy of the order, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Title: Stuck Here Fandom: Blake's 7 Pairing/Characters: Vila Restal & Kerr Avon Content Notes: None Prompt: 30 March - Vila Restal & Kerr Avon: "Stuck in the middle with you."
I just finished House of Leaves as part of my horror marathon and I think the most disturbing concept I've encountered in horror isn't a monster or a villain it's a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside and the reason it broke me is so much quieter than I expected because on paper that sounds almost whimsical right and then you sit with what it actually means and something shifts.
So space is the one thing we completely take for granted as stable and neutral and House of Leaves takes that assumption and just quietly removes it and doesn't replace it with anything and the horror isn't the darkness inside the house or the growling or even the thing that might be in there, it's the geometry and the fact that the geometry is wrong and has always been wrong and you didn't notice until now.
The book implies that the house isn't haunted in any traditional sense, it's not malevolent exactly, it just exists in a way that shouldn't be possible and doesn't care that it shouldn't be possible and that indifference is so much worse than intent would be because at least a monster wants something and wanting something is a logic you can work with and I haven't fully felt comfortable in rooms since finishing it two days ago and I keep doing this thing where I measure distances with my eyes and then question whether I'm measuring correctly and I hate that this book did that to me and I also kind of love it, so yeah, as I understand, monsters arent the only thing that can be scary xd
What's the concept that got under your skin the most?
We were looking for a dumb movie to watch late last night, so we picked Thanksgiving, knowing nothing about it, other than its a dumb gore flick.
As usual there are the dumb deaths that happen, but for anyone else who has watched the film, when we got the table saw death scene, it was completely cut out, a jarring hard cut, and its over.
I had to look it up on Youtube to see if that's actually what was supposed to happen.
No where on Netflix does it say it's censored?
And I cant see anything online about it being censored?
~ [The pipes suddenly issue forth such a hideous, unearthly screech it could almost be believed that some kind of immense alien monster is dying within them. Like a striking cobra, KOCHANSKI smashes her spanner into the offending ironwork, sending three loud clangs reverberating throughout the ship]. Duct Soup (Series VII, Episode IV).
AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.
well…darn
like to charge reblog to cast financial ruin of the AI industry 🔮
originally posted August 8th, 2025.
Authors have until March 30th, 2026 (That is just 9 days as of this reblog, which I am posting on March 21st, 2026) to file their claim against Anthropic to be reimbursed up to $3,000 per work found in the list.
Please click the above link for all of the exact details of how to file a claim and to check for your works, and share this post as far and wide as you can before March 30th, 2026!
!!!SIGNAL BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOST!!!
Seriously, friends! If you’re a member of the class in the class action, you now have less than 48 hours left to file your claim. If you’re owed money and do not file your claim before March 30, YOU WILL GET NO MONEY.
Don’t leave this on the table, cousins! You owe it to the creative community to take EVERY DAMN DOLLAR YOU CAN out of these thieves’ hides.
Here’s the Authors Guild page about it. It’s not insanely complicated, and if you’re in the class, they’ve made it easy for you to ID the works involved. (More than 30 for me, for example. Argh.)
Any horror about fear of silence? Especially good if it's mentioned or discussed. When I type "sedatephobia", I usually barely find anything worthy even on YouTube.
The weather has been erratic here, with more whiplash. We did get a good soaking rain recently. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, and a fox squirrel. Red-winged blackbirds have been singing overhead. Leafing out: mayapple, Dutchman's breeches. Currently blooming: crocuses, daffodils, squill, violets, apricot, grape hyacinths, tulips, cherry.
Man, this thing. Not a great film, it’s fine, but when he threw the little dude off the castle, holy shit. I about fell off the couch. And homeboy gets up unscathed.
On top of being flat, I appear to be actually sick with some kind of non-flu, non-COVID crud which makes my entire body feel as though it has a fever and my thermometer disagree with me. I was doing fine with just the two eye infections and the unremitting headache. My major achievement of the day besides feeding the cat and bringing a bag of groceries inside has been reading, most pleasantly Donald Swann's The Space Between the Bars: A Book of Reflections (1968).
As a reading experience, it suggests a journal that got away from its keeper. Despite several autobiographical chapters, it is not a memoir; it interrupts itself to redirect the disappointed reader toward the available oral histories of Flanders and Swann and it ends with the author in a devil's advocate argument with himself about the entire project. "Green baize flags! Good idea." The style throughout is conversational and the structure consciously disorganized on the principle that some of the most insightful traffic of ideas occurs at odd hours by chance, like the radio conversation in Chicago in 1961 which he assumed would be a ten-minute promotional spot when he agreed to it and which ran instead from eleven-thirty at night until two in the morning when the station turned out the lights. After the fashion of letters, or a column, or a blog, he will mention periodically that he is writing from a coffee shop in New York where the Muzak annoys him or that he has just taken a break from his chapter about Christmas Eve to see Mai Zetterling's Night Games (1966). I had no idea he had attended the Easter 1967 Central Park be-in, where he looked like a total square and had a wonderful time: he found the hippie ethos congenial and if he wasn't personally into the psychedelic scene, he respected its mystical side. "To the English eye, there was a resemblance to a good humoured Bank Holiday crowd, only the clothes were weirder." It would have been near the end of the tour of At the Drop of Another Hat. I had known about his Anglo-Russian, half-Muslim parentage which accounted for the Ibrahim in the middle of his otherwise amiably English-sounding name, but it was never clear to me how far he thought of himself as a mixed person and the answer seems to have been thoroughly. He is amazingly anti-nationalist, in a way that differentiates itself carefully from the love of people and places which he falls into on a regular basis, sometimes naively, always sincerely, sometimes without any roses in his glasses at all. Greece knocked him sideways during his time with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but territorially, specifically, Epirus, Thesprotia, Igoumenitsa. A week in Tonga and he is already recording some of his favorite vocabulary and the musical notation. "If you were to draw me out on aspects of Britain that I admire I could run on for ages, from underground trains, an impartial judiciary and kippers, to its new fashion flair and its sudden ability to make coffee." His Christianity is a constant lens and it is similarly anarchic. He likes ritual, not organization. Syncretism thrills him as much as sectarianism gets him down. He has a perfectly lucid analysis of his experience of revelation climbing down the Mount of Olives at the age of twenty-one, having been relegated by dysentery from his work in a refugee camp in—call the projectionist, the millennium's stuck again—Gaza. "We are all minus each other, there is no one who cannot be my saviour." I can't tell if he knows that at one point he is quoting Hillel, but I have to hope from his paean to the cracks in things that before the end of his life he managed to discover Leonard Cohen. For that matter, I hope he remained a socialist. He was not unaware that his optimism was working uphill: "I assure you that after World War Two people talked the way I am doing now; they really thought there would be human rights, and had meetings about them . . . I am trying to reset the stage for a one world consciousness, and every morning newspaper is stopping me." I respect his intention not to have written a funny book, but Michael Flanders was not the only chronically clever case in that partnership. Also it is very difficult to tell people with a straight face that you almost fell off the Great Pyramid of Giza. Anyway, aside from making me feel justified in my longstanding affection for Swann based on little more originally than his tongue-twister modern Greek and his chaotic laugh, this unwieldily absorbing set of meditations provided a piece of invaluable intelligence:
"They are all pacifists there," said a man at a party in Boston to me. He had just been on a businessman's trip to GHQ Omaha, where they push the button that sets off the H bombs. Fortunately Tom Lehrer was also listening and he said: "Why don't they invite some Chinese and Russian generals instead of businessmen?" That stopped that.
I had never been sure if they knew one another socially outside of the shelves of record collections. Now I know. I have so many questions. Look at what can happen when you realize you have spent an entire month singing "20 Tons of TNT."
What patients say while coming out of anesthesia can be surprisingly revealing. And a Los Angeles-based gay ICU nurse is using that to counter straight men complaining about the “gay voice.”
Addison (TikTok/@big_daddy_addie) has been a nurse for over seven years and is tired of hearing one thing. “Gay men force their voices.” And “gay men talk ‘normal’ after coming out of anesthesia.” His counter? Revealing straight men secrets from the ICU.
I just watched (S)kids, a punk theme movie on YouTube about a new kid that goes to a new town and college, and that year of college is completely crazy, it has the animation, the music, the vibe, it was great. And then I remembered Dinner in America which I kinda felt the same way but not as strong as (S)Kids, so I'm looking for movies with the same punk teenager problems vibe, any good recommendation?
In city after city, a quiet alliance often develops between two people who rarely coordinate directly: the resident pushing from outside city hall and the staff member working inside it.
One pushes from outside. The other nudges from within.
This informal partnership rarely appears on an organizational chart, yet it turns out to be one of the most reliable ways local change actually happens. A recent story from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, illustrates how this dynamic unfolds, but before getting there it helps to understand the environment inside local government that makes this relationship so important.
On March 30, 1958, Maurice LaMarche was born in Toronto, Ontario. A veteran voice actor, LaMarche voiced Dr. Egon Spengler across The Real Ghostbusters, Slimer!, and Extreme Ghostbusters. On March 30, 2020, Sony Pictures officially delayed Ghostbusters: Afterlife from its planned July 10, 2020, release to March 5, 2021. The shift was part of a […]
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Over the past two years, rightsholders of all kinds have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models.
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