Source: Ars Technica
Meta is leveraging a recent Supreme Court decision about ISP liability to argue it shouldn’t be held responsible for using BitTorrent to distribute copyrighted material for training its AI models—essentially claiming the act of transmission, not the underlying use of content, is what matters legally. If the precedent holds, tech companies could systematically acquire training data through methods that would otherwise constitute infringement, with liability falling only on the infrastructure layer rather than the entity actually using the data. The ruling will determine whether copyright holders can effectively block the industrial-scale data harvesting that AI development requires, or whether transmission-layer immunity becomes a loophole that lets AI companies treat the internet as a free training corpus.