Mark Zuckerberg "Personally Authorized" the Theft. Now There's a Lawsuit.

Last week, five major publishers and bestselling author Scott Turow filed a lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg personally. The allegation? That Zuckerberg himself authorized Meta to torrent hundreds of millions of pirated books to train their AI. If you've ever wondered whether Big Tech actually respects your creative work, here's your answer.

The Scale of the Theft

According to the lawsuit, Meta downloaded over 267 terabytes of pirated material from sites like LibGen. That's many times the size of the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. Hundreds of millions of books, articles, and publications, all torrented from pirate websites that Meta's own employees acknowledged were illegal. The plaintiffs called this "one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history." That's not hyperbole. That's the complaint.

They Knew Exactly What They Were Doing

This wasn't an accident or oversight. In December 2023, Meta employees circulated an internal memo describing LibGen as "a dataset we know to be pirated." The memo also noted they would not disclose the use of these datasets. When the question of whether to license content properly came up earlier that year, the decision was escalated to Zuckerberg himself. After that meeting, the licensing efforts stopped. The pirating continued.

Move Fast and Break Things

The lawsuit invokes Meta's famous motto, and it's hard to imagine a more fitting application. This is what "move fast and break things" looks like when applied to the creative work of millions of authors and publishers. It means treating your copyright as an inconvenience to be circumvented in the "AI arms race."

This is the same company that runs Instagram, the platform where millions of visual artists share their work every day. The same company building AI image generators. The same company that wants you to believe they're a partner to creators.

Why This Matters for Visual Artists

The lawsuit focuses on books and publications, but the principle applies to every creator. If Meta is willing to torrent hundreds of millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites while internally acknowledging it's illegal, what makes you think your paintings, photographs, or illustrations are being treated any differently?

Scott Turow and five major publishers have the resources to take this fight to court. Most working artists don't. But this lawsuit matters for all of us, because it will help establish whether companies like Meta can simply take what they want, or whether creators have rights that actually mean something.

I'll be watching this case closely. You should too.

What's your reaction? Does this change how you think about sharing your work on Meta's platforms?