Today, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) chaired a Judiciary subcommittee hearing revealing Big Tech’s role behind the unchecked piracy of copyrighted content to fuel companies’ artificial intelligence (AI) models. The hearing featured witness testimony from bestselling author David Baldacci as well as AI experts and law professors who lent credence to Senator Hawley’s claim: AI companies, namely Meta, have crossed the line of technological innovation into corporate crime.
“Today’s hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in American history. . . . AI companies are training their models on stolen material, period. . . . And we’re not talking about these companies simply scouring the internet for what’s publicly available. We’re talking about piracy,” Senator Hawley said.
“Are we going to protect [Americans’ creative community], or are we going to allow a few mega-corporations to vacuum it all up, digest it, and make billions of dollars in profits—maybe trillions—and pay nobody for it. That’s not America,” the Senator argued, explaining that the issue at hand is a moral one as much as a legal one.
Baldacci went on to point out the harm mass piracy poses to America’s authors, songwriters, and other creative producers, whose works are now in the crosshairs of Big Tech’s lawlessness.
“Every single one of my books was presented to me . . . in three seconds. It really felt like I had been robbed of everything of my entire adult life that I had worked on,” Baldacci said.
Key revelations uncovered during the hearing include:
- AI companies being trained on over 200 terabytes of copyrighted work—or, in other words, billions of pages that would fill approximately 22 Libraries of Congress.
- Big Tech having pirated this work by illegally downloading it.
- AI companies having facilitated other actors’ piracy by illegally uploading more than 50 terabytes of copyrighted works for others’ use.
- Meta knowing it was engaging in illegal activity.
• Employees internally warned each other that Meta’s piracy was illegal—and then brazenly made light of it.
• Meta concealed its pirating via non-Meta servers, so its criminal acts would not be traced back to the company.
Watch the full subcommittee hearing here or at top of article.
