WATCH: Josh Hawley Pulls Up Meta Employee Chat Logs In Front Of Congress Showing 'Pirating' Scheme

0:00 question or two about some of the evidence. We talked about Meta engineers saying that they they realized what they were doing was crossing an ethical line, uh that they felt they shouldn't be doing it, but they had to cut some corners. Let me just ask you, did did Meta ever try to hide what it was doing? Did it try to hide the fact that it was it was pirating these works? What the documents show is that in 2024 when Meta began to use Anna's archive, it decided intentionally to not use its own servers and instead to go through Amazon web services in order to uh ensure that the seating the sharing of uh pirated works would not be traced back to Meta's own IP. >> It doesn't sound to me like a company

0:45 and executives that think what they're doing is above board. Sounds like a company that thinks that what they're doing is probably illegal in some manner, but they want to go on doing it anyway. Let me just show you a couple of documents. Help us understand what we're seeing here. These are more meta engineers now again working on AI. We've got the first one, Nikolai, who says, "Not sure we can use Meta's IPs to load through torrent pirate content." Haha. The I emphasize these are their documents. I mean, for all of Professor Lee's, and again, I appreciate Professor Lee making these arguments, but for all of Professor Lee's comments that we're not sure if it's really pirated or not, they thought so. Meta, this is meta. Meta thought so. The next person says, the next employee,

1:31 I'm curious to start looking at some samples, but I feel like we should get some clarity on what's allowed and how. Smiling emoji. Nicicolay again. Haha. Yeah, I think torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right. I mean, what are we looking at here, Mr. Prit? I mean, does this is this an attempt to be above board and forthcoming and, you know, they think everything's fine? >> I think that is a very difficult conclusion to draw from these documents. And with all due respect to professor Lee uh as I am still litigating uh the case against Meta on behalf of a group of authors, Judge Chabri in that case specifically declined to decide whether Meta's piracy what it has engaged in in terms of the downloading the making available the

2:17 making additional copies and then sending those copies over 40 terabytes of data to other individuals is in fact fair use and no court including the Supreme Court has ever held that rank piracy is somehow fair use and instead the Supreme Court case law is the still law of the land says that fair use presupposes good faith and fair dealing. I will leave it to you whether or not you think any of these documents shows fair good faith and fair dealing. Let's just look at at one other document and ask ourselves if this looks like good faith and and fair dealing. Uh more meta employees, more AI engineers.

3:03 Frank, can you clarify why we can't use Facebook infra internal for this? Again, the Frank Zang replies, we've got to avoid the risk of tracing back the cedar from an a Facebook server. And he clarifies, avoid the risk of tracing back the cedar download are from Facebook servers. So, here we have Meta employees saying they know they're pirating. They think it's ethically wrong. They think it's illegal. And they are actively avoiding trying to create a paper trail. They're trying to hide it. I mean, that doesn't sound like fair use to me. Does it sound like fair use to you, Professor Lee? I mean, you do you think this is fair? >> I would just say I agree with Judge Chabrio's approach. the distribution claim is still live in the case and this

3:49 aspect of the torrenting may well be infringement and not fair use. >> I'll just say this, if this isn't infringement, Congress needs to do something. I mean, if this if if the answer is that the biggest corporation in the world worth trillions of dollars can come take an individual author's work like Mr. Baldachi, lie about it, hide it, profit off of it, and there's nothing our law does about that. We need to change the law. And if nothing else comes out of this hearing today, I hope that's it. And I hope that this is motivation to this body that we need to be paying attention to what's going on here. Mr. Bodach, you said you'd rather live in a different planet if there was AI that could that could write your books. I'm sure that that will never happen. They'll never write your books. I want to live on a different planet if if this can go on

4:34 and it's perfectly legal. We've got to do something about this. Let me just ask you, Mr. Prit. Finally, what about Mark Zuckerberg in all of this? I mean, do do we think that Zuckerberg knew about this, approved this? I mean, what's the evidence suggest? Certainly the documents that have become public in the case uh explain that the decision whether or not to uh use Library Genesis, which is a notorious illicit marketplace, for example, um for actual training as opposed to exploration was escalated to Mark Zuckerberg. >> I think the judge said something to this effect. Let's just look here if we've got it. that in fact uh Zuckerberg was asked

5:20 about it. There it is. In the spring of 2023 after failing to acquire licenses and following escalation up to Zuckerberg, Meta decided to just use the works acquired from a torrenting platform as training data. So they just did it anyway. That just yeah, you know, do it anyway. Forget it. Don't pay Mr. Baldachi. Don't pay anybody. Costs too much. Lot cheaper to take it for free and then make billions of dollars off of it. Listen, I'll just I'll just conclude with this. I want to thank all the witnesses for their for their testimony and uh Senator Welch, if you have more questions or Senator Durban, happy happy to let you ask those. For my part, I just want to say I think that this is a moral issue as much as anything else. I think this is an issue about who we going to be as a country. Are we going to be a country as written into our

6:05 Constitution where we protect the rights of our citizens? It's part of what makes us Americans and we welcome the creative genius of people like Mr. Baldachi and the the marvelous diversity of imagination and viewpoints and and perspectives that has come to characterize our country. Are we going to protect that? 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. That's not our country. It never has been. Listen, I'm all for the free market. I'm glad Mark Zuckerberg can make his billions. That's fine. But not by running over people like Mr. Baldachi or anybody else or any young author who's trying to get a start or any other person, creative, non-creative, or just a working guy who puts something on Facebook. Why should all his stuff get

6:52 taken? I just think that's wrong. I think it's morally wrong. I think frankly it's not consent with our principles as Americans. And I think we can and should do better than that. Can I Senator Welch, Senator Durban, >> I want to thank again the witnesses for being here. Thanks to each of you. I know you had to travel far for this and um thank you for again for accommodating our schedule. Thanks to everyone who's been here today and with that we'll stand ajourned. Great. Thank you.