Photo Credit: Rebecca Hammel / Public Domain
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) presided over a high-profile Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing that placed Big Tech’s use of copyrighted works for AI training under an intense microscope.
Hawley opened the session with a pointed assertion,” Today’s hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in American history. For all of the talk about artificial intelligence and innovation and the future that comes out of Silicon Valley, here is the truth nobody wants to admit: AI companies are training their models on stolen material.”
The hearing was titled, “Too Big to Prosecute? Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training,” and included testimony that accused leading Ai companies such as Meta and Anthropic of training their models with massive amounts of pirated material—much of it sourced from illegal shadow libraries online. Legal experts and authors, including The New York Times best-seller David Baldacci, emphasized that creators of these works were not compensated for their use, while tech companies benefitted commercially.
“As AI companies scrambled to outpace each other, many of them turned to illegal pirate websites—massive repositories of tens of millions of stolen and copyrighted works—to get text for their AI models,” Attorney Maxwell Pritt of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP told the subcommittee. “By pirating these works for free rather than buying or licensing them from copyright owners, AI companies have built a multi-billion dollar industry generally without paying a single cent to either the creatives whose works are powering their products or the publishers responsible for introducing and providing those works to the public.”
Evidence presented at the hearing included internal Meta communications, where some employees objected to the use of pirated materials. “I don’t think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line there,” one engineer at Meta said. Despite brief attempts to pursue licensing, testimony alleged that Meta’s leadership decided to move forward with piracy of those materials. ”Are we going to protect [America’s creatives] 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,” Hawley told the subcommittee.
Lawsuits against AI companies are mounting from authors, publishers, and even major newspapers, but recent federal judicial decisions have produced mixed outcomes. In one high-profile case, a federal judge found that plaintiffs failed to present enough evidence to prove market dilution from Meta’s use of copyrighted books. But the issue of training these models on pirated materials still violates copyright law.
As discussions continue, both congressional scrutiny and the legal stakes for AI firms remain unusually high, with musicians and creators watching closely to see whether existing laws will suffice—or whether Congress will introduce new copyright protections to ensure fair compensation and protect creative livelihoods.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Music Industry News, Music Law, Politics, Pop Culture
This post was originally authored and published by Ashley King Digital Music News via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
