▶ 0:18:58Chair Grassley: The hearing today is entitled "too big to prosecute?:examining the ai industry's mass ingestion of copywrighted works for ai training."
▶ 0:19:11Sen. Hawley: I'm excited to work with my call and come out ranking member durbin. Many of you traveled to be her today. Thank you for accommodating our change in time. The subfloor will be tied up later today and thus no committee business is happening. Thank you for being here and accommodating us. I will make a few opening remarks and senator durbin will do the same and then we will swear in the witnesses and be off to the races. Today's hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in american history.
▶ 0:19:40Sen. Hawley: For all the talk about artificial intelligence, and innovation in the future that comes out of silicon valley, here is the truth nobody wants to admit. They are companies are training their models on stolen material, period. That's the fact. We aren't talking about the company simply scouring the internet for what is publicly available. We are talking about piracy. We are talking about theft.
▶ 0:20:09Sen. Hawley: For years ar companies have stolen massive amounts of copyrighted material from illegal online repositories. The fbi and department of homeland security regularly prosecute individuals that engage in the same kind of behavior using platforms like limewire or napster under the old days, using a process called torrent doing. Have these big tech companies been prosecuted? No. They are getting off scott free.
▶ 0:20:41Sen. Hawley: This hearing will show us that meta-and anthropic and other ar companies are willfully using illegal torrent and networks to steal vast swaths of copyrighted material. The amount we are talking about is mind-boggling. We are talking about every book and every academic article ever written. Every book and every academic article ever written.
▶ 0:21:11Sen. Hawley: Billions of pages of copyrighted works, enough to fill 22 libraries the size of the library of congress. Think of that. 22 libraries of congress is full of works. That is how much has been stolen and it was not an innocent mistake. They knew what they were doing. They pirated materials willfully.
▶ 0:21:33Sen. Hawley: As the idea of pirating copyrighted works percolated through meta-, to take one example, employee after employee warned management what they were doing was illegal. One employee told management " this is not trivial." and he shared an article asking the probability of getting arrested for using torrents in the united states but another meta-employee shared an article that said downloading from illegal
▶ 0:22:04Sen. Hawley: Repositories with open meta up to a legal ramifications, say what they are doing was 100% barred by copyright law. It did meta-management listen? No. They bulldozed straight ahead. We will see evidence today mark zuckerberg himself tried to hide the illegal download of pirated works.
▶ 0:22:32Sen. Hawley: Not just the illegal download, the unequal distribution of the same works. They tried to hide it by using noncompany servers. They went so far as to train there I model -- they are ar model about what data it had been turned upon. You talk about an inception level where the deception. Training the ara remodel to lie about what its own sources were. These are aggressive business tactics and criminal conduct.
▶ 0:23:02Sen. Hawley: I want to point out that meta's conduct is not an exception. This is the rule now in the ai space. Big tech operates on the model of doing whatever you want I'm counting on lobbyists and lawyers to fix it later. They don't care about the rule of law, freedom, america, or working people. They care about power and money.
▶ 0:23:26Sen. Hawley: Every time they say things like "we can't let china beat us" what they are really saying is give us truckloads of cash and let us steal everything from you. We will see that in the testimony and evidence today. Here is the bottom line. We have to do something to protect the people of this country.
▶ 0:23:51Sen. Hawley: I am all for innovation, but not at the price of legality or destroying the intellectual property of the average man and woman in this country. We have laws for a reason. The laws ought to be enforced. Big tech should not be above the law. Enough is enough. It's time to enforce the law. That's what this hearing is about.
▶ 0:24:16Sen. Durbin: The way ai interacts with intellectual property rights at the critical topic we cannot overlook. Software, music, movies, literature, collectively contribute over a trillion dollars to our economy each year, and employ millions of people. While ai can be an incredible tool that unlocks further creativity, writers, artists, musicians, and others are rightfully concerned about what technology means to them personally.
▶ 0:24:45Sen. Durbin: Should ai companies be able to use their materials freely as "fair use"? Or should they receive compensation when their works are used to train ai models. I discovered intellectual property when I was an attorney in springfield, illinois and in a rash moment decided to buy a restaurant. We had live music. I got a phone call one day from a fellow who said I was just at your restaurant. I said, did you have a good time? Could not have been better.
▶ 0:25:17Sen. Durbin: Saturday night and the music was terrific. He said, you played 10 tunes. He said, the way the law is written you are responsible by the fact that copyrighted material was used to make a profit at your restaurant. He said before you say that call your friend in jacksonville, illinois, a few miles away about a similar experience.
▶ 0:25:47Sen. Durbin: His reaction with the same as yours. I called my friend and asked that much money he needs each month and we started paying it. That was my first course on intellectual property. How can creators compete with ai products to generate content at the push of a button especially when many produce their own work?
▶ 0:26:13Sen. Durbin: That is what we will try to consider in the hearing as we find the right balance between protecting technological innovation, protecting the work of our nation's creators and continuing to incentivize creativity in the years to come. We must recognize ai innovation and intellectual property are not mutually exclusive. That is why it is troubling as I listen carefully to the chairman to hear about the steps big tech companies are taking to train ai models on copyrighted materials without compensation to the creators of these works.
▶ 0:26:46Sen. Durbin: Companies like meta and anthropic have obtained copyrighted materials from sites that host pirated copies of the author's books and writing. Anthropic pirated over 7 million bucks from shadow -- books from shadow libraries. Anthropic had many places from which it could purchase but provided preferred to steal them.
▶ 0:27:14Sen. Durbin: Anthropic later it became a not so gung ho about training their lom on pirated books for legal reasons but it kept the pirated copies it had already downloaded anyway. As a judge in the meta case recently put it, companies have been unable to resist the temptation to feed copyrighted materials into their models without getting permission from the copyright holders to use their work for this purpose. Chair hawley it it's the --
▶ 0:27:49Chair Hawley: Stand and raise your right hand and repeat after me. You swear the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Very good. Opening statements. Five minutes for each witness.
▶ 0:28:07Chair Hawley: I will say a brief word of introduction for each witness but we will go down the dais starting with maxwell pritt a partner at boies schiller flexner llp representing authors in a copyright infringement suit against meta.
▶ 0:28:26Mr. Pritt: Thank you for the invitation and opportunity to testify today. "of the art of the deal" by donald trump "hillbilly elegy" by jd vance "theater roosevelt: preacher of righteousness" by josh hawley.
▶ 0:28:44Mr. Pritt: Just a handful of the many many millions of copyrighted books and publications that some of the world's largest and wealthiest corporations, meta, openai, and topic, and others knowingly and intentionally pirated from it to sit online marketplaces for financial gain and to seek a competitive advantage in ai. Today the committee begins to investigate and shine a light on what is likely the largest infringement of american intellectual property by U.S.
▶ 0:29:14Mr. Pritt: Companies in our nations history. As a tech company scrambled to release generative ai models and catch up with openai's chatgpt, many of them turned it to elicit online repositories to take tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of books and scholarly publications and articles for free instead of buying them or licensing them from copyright owners.
▶ 0:29:40Mr. Pritt: By pirating these works ai companies have built a multibillion dollar industry projected to be a trillion dollar industry in the next few years without paying a single cent to the authors whose works, their products or that -- the publisher is responsible for introducing those works to the public here and abroad. Take meta-. From the early days of its generative ai program meta-concluded training it's models using books and articles would help their performance.
▶ 0:30:11Mr. Pritt: Instead of buying or licensing these works from copyright owners, meta decided to take them from notorious online marketplaces of stolen copyrighted works including some of the same ones targeted by the fbi and department of justice for criminal copyright infringement. Meta did not just download books from these illegal repositories. It used the same peer to peer file sharing napster.
▶ 0:30:39Mr. Pritt: Meta also made copies and send them to other pirates, in total pirating well over 200 terabytes of pirated books and articles, a size comparable to the entire printed collection of the library of congress 20 times over or the equivalent to a stack of many billions of pages of text.
▶ 0:31:03Mr. Pritt: Meta's piracy included millions of works including 12 books authored by members of the subcommittee and every U.S. president and vice president in the 21st century. Meta made and sent copies of over 40 terabytes of pirated works to others. Meta helped revive online piracy by propping up the foreign criminal syndicates that run elicit marketplaces to violate U.S.
▶ 0:31:33Mr. Pritt: Copyrights around the world. And as archives, the largest online marketplace of stolen literature in the world today says on its own website "shadow libraries were dying. Then came ai." meta is not alone and it was not the first U.S. company to engage in rampant domestic piracy for its own purposes.
▶ 0:31:55Mr. Pritt: Pitting lawsuits against openai and anthropic revealed both companies also pirated millions of copyrighted works and the decision to engage in this nasa domestic piracy were made at the highest levels. -- mass domestic piracy were made at the highest levels. The decision to pirated instead of license was approved by meta's co-founder mark zuckerberg himself. Even though employees knew that doing so was both illegal and unethical.
▶ 0:32:25Mr. Pritt: One meta researcher argued using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold and another called meta an accomplice to piracy. Yet another warned that if the media got wind of the company's use of pirated data, it could undermine meta's under it -- negotiating position with regulators. The very people in this room, and in the white house and state houses across the country.
▶ 0:32:51Mr. Pritt: When asked if he cared whether meta protects human creativity rather than exploited, meta's head of partnership testify he does not care. Ai companies now seek a pass for this unprecedented piracy by invoking a limited exception to copyright infringement called fair use that congress codified in the copyright act of 1976. They argue they cannot compete with china if they cannot infringe every american's.
▶ 0:33:22Mr. Pritt: Nonsense. Our tech companies employ the best and brightest minds in the world. They are the wealthiest corporations in the world. It's not credible for these companies to argue they can invest hundreds of billions of dollars in talent and building data centers to power commercial products and models but they can't pay a single sent to copyright owners. There is no carveout in the copyright act for ai companies to engage in mass digital piracy.
▶ 0:33:49Mr. Pritt: I'm grateful to chairman holly, ranking member durbin and the subcommittee for your attention to the issue. Thank you for your questions.
▶ 0:33:57Chair Hawley: The professor of information technology and marketing at carnegie mellon university. He has written extensively on piracy and its effects on innovation. Professor smith.
▶ 0:34:10Mr. Smith: I am honored and thankful for the opportunity to testify today on this important issue. My testimony is informed by 25 years of empirical research to the impact of new technologies on the creative markets. And my experience serving on a round table of 10 economists convened by the U.S.
▶ 0:34:36Mr. Smith: Copyright office to study the generative implications of ai on copyright policy. My interest on a piracy started in the early 2001 digital policy was a relatively new problem for the creative industry.
▶ 0:34:51Mr. Smith: Many in the technology community argued piracy was a fair use because it would not harm legal sales, was unlikely to harm creativity and any legislative efforts to curtail policy would be an effective and stifle innovation. My empirical research over the past 25 years have studied these questions. In 2020 my college that I studied over 40 papers in peer-reviewed academic journals as part of a piracy landscape study for the U.S. patent and trademark office.
▶ 0:35:21Mr. Smith: Our report drew three broad conclusions. First, peer-reviewed academic literature shows digital piracy does harm creators by reducing their ability to make money from their creative efforts. Second, the peer-reviewed academic literature it shows digital piracy does harm society by reducing economic incentives for investment.
▶ 0:35:43Mr. Smith: Peer-reviewed academic literature shows copyright enforcement has been effective arresting these harms while also allowing businesses and online distribution platforms to thrive and innovate. Today we are hearing many had the same arguments we heard in the early days of the internet, allowing generative ai companies to use pirated content to train their models is fair use because it won't harm legal sales or creativity.
▶ 0:36:11Mr. Smith: Any enforcement efforts to curtail the use of pirated material for training will not only be ineffective, but stifle innovation trade while the time has changed some of the underlying economic principles are the same today as they were in 2000. By applying those principles we can draw many of the same conclusions. First, the link of pirated content to train generative ai models will harm sales for creators.
▶ 0:36:35Mr. Smith: Allowing generative ai companies to train models with pirated content is likely to harm markets for creators by damaging the original markets for their work. By damaging licensing markets for those works. And by creating perverse incentives for bad actors to add new copyrighted content, allowing generative ai companies to launder licensable conduct -- content through piracy.
▶ 0:37:02Mr. Smith: The use of pirated content to train generative ai models will harm society by reducing economic incentives for creators, similar to the early piracy research. Economic incentives drive creative output. There was a new and unique indignity to the current situation.
▶ 0:37:19Mr. Smith: When piracy is used to train generative ai models we aren't only stealing from creators we are using the theft of their content to create tools that can flood the market with machine generative output in turn replacing many creators, particularly, emerging markets.
▶ 0:37:38Mr. Smith: Third, in the early days of piracy we believe in forcing copyright law in the context of generative ai training can be effective in reversing these harms and create a world where that creative industries and technology industries are able to thrive. If the napster decisions went to the other way in the early 2000's it's hard to imagine spotify and netflix would exist today.
▶ 0:38:01Mr. Smith: It would be to the detriment of consumers, the creative community, and the technology community. Today we have a similar opportunity to create a window for society, creators, and tech firms by making it here piracy is wrong and a vibrant technology economy depends on a vibrant creative economy. We found a way to make license streaming and sales channels work for consumers and copyright owners in the early 2000's.
▶ 0:38:30Mr. Smith: We must do the same for generative ai today. Generative ai has the potential to benefit the industry on society in many ways. Achieving that potential will require more robust partnership between technology firms and creative industries. On our current path we risk killing the goose or the authors, musicians, coders, and filmmakers that laid the golden ads key to the present and future value of generative ai outlook.
▶ 0:39:02Mr. Smith: Mossavar-rahmani --chair
▶ 0:39:07Hawley: Next is professor bhamati viswanathan. Thank you for being here. The floor is yours.
▶ 0:39:18Ms. Viswanathan: Thank you so much. I am honored to testify today on a subject I feel passionate about. Senator hawley did a great job of laying the table. I want to drill down on what he has presented and walk through this.
▶ 0:39:41Ms. Viswanathan: Generative ai is a promising set of technologies and we can all agree they are beneficial paired however, the training they are engaging in is deeply problematic and troubling. Courts don't know what to do about this yet. They have not reached a consensus on what should obviously be done about the training of ai on pirated works. I want to give a call for action and a solution as I'd hoped through this. We know that what pirate websites are doing is illegal.
▶ 0:40:11Ms. Viswanathan: How? Multiple have been brought against pirate sites and in every case the private or repository has lost. The fbi, the department of homeland security has gone after private websites and tried to shut them down. This can be like lacrimal. What they shut down, they come back up again. But it is established that what they are doing is illegal and it makes sense.
▶ 0:40:35Ms. Viswanathan: If you are and I still books from the library or a bookstore and said I need to train, to learn, to develop my mind, we would not argue this is very loot -- fair use. We would say, you can't steal materials even for good cause. That's not what is happening here. The ai generative companies are going to private websites, stealing the materials that have already been stolen. It is a crime compounding a crime. How is this fair?
▶ 0:41:07Ms. Viswanathan: Say you want to go dragracing. An illegal activity. I tell you, there is a shop down the street that shares -- st s cells stolen cars for cheap. If you drag race and win you get to say, it is ok that I bought a stolen car and engaged in illegal activity. That is what is happening here.
▶ 0:41:36Ms. Viswanathan: It is a crime compounding a crime and it's not a victimless crime. As for assessor smith -- professor smith showed, there are real victims, the loss of authors livelihoods. As an author I feel like the loss of my livelihood not only hurts, but affects what I spent my life training to do. It contravenes copyright laws, basic incentive structure.
▶ 0:42:03Ms. Viswanathan: I teach copyright law as well and this is enshrined in the U.S. constitution. The intellectual property clause is one of the things that makes the country not just great, but robust, powerful, economically hugely successful. Over a trillion dollars in revenue from the creative content industries. This is truly at risk right now. This entire incentive structure that was brilliantly thought of by our founders. It has negative incentives.
▶ 0:42:33Ms. Viswanathan: If you know you can go to a pirate website and steal things why would you ever pay for anything again? Generative ai companies have shown us the way, not just by themselves, but by others as well. It appreciates the quality and quantity of work out there. The trade-off of copyright law is you, the copyright author, take the risk and the market rewards you with rewards if the marketplace likes what you have done.
▶ 0:43:01Ms. Viswanathan: There is no incentive structure anymore that has been undermined by what is happening now. And there is a solution. The solution is licensing. It already exists. The licensing of works. The fair compensation of creators. These are all things that exist now. We don't even need new legislation in some ways. We might need that as well someday but right now we have a solution. And forth good, standard, accepted, acknowledged licensing practices.
▶ 0:43:32Ms. Viswanathan: Not to say we are against innovation. We believe in innovation. We believe generative ai has potential. You can't compromise the livelihood of creators. You can't compromise our creative activity and world of art and culture. And the things we have done that make us most human and enrich us the most. You cannot compromise those by saying we need new technologies to flourish.
▶ 0:43:58Ms. Viswanathan: We need new technologies to flourish fairly, sustainably, in ways that make sense to us and have already been provided for by our constitution, by the U.S. copyright law, by intellectual property law itself. It is critical congress recognize this is the trade-off that matters for the livelihoods of everyone whose lives right now and well-being is at risk.
▶ 0:44:23Sen. Hawley: Next is david baldacci, one of the best-selling authors in america. I don't know how many books he has had as a new york times bestseller. Maybe he will tell us. I have read his books and I'm delighted to have him here today. He will tell us about ai's impact on authors. Bald pop it's a lot. I will leave it at that. Chairman hawley, ranking member durbin, members of the subcommittee, 119 euros go mark twain traveled to D.C.
▶ 0:44:51Sen. Hawley: And appeared before the congressional committee to advocate on behalf of stronger copyright laws. He was the most pirated author of his day and I am pirated all over the world as well. He thought creative arts was the lifeblood of this country and I agree with him. It was the first time in that hearing he wore his signature white suit publicly. He did so because he thought it represented purity of thought and spirit. I don't own a white suit.
▶ 0:45:20Sen. Hawley: And even if I did, I don't think my wife would have let me wear it today. So you just get blue. Twain once said travel is fatal to prejudice. Meaning if you meet people where they live, you find out they are just like you. I had no chance to leave this aggravated -- the segregated world of richmond, virginia growing up but I visited the library often and traveled the world through books.
▶ 0:45:49Sen. Hawley: I kept going, honing my craft, remaining discipline, taking rejection head-on, and using them as motivation. Finally I was successful. After 60 novels under my belt, I work just as hard as I have or have. It is the american way. You work hard, play fair, stay the course, and you will make it.
▶ 0:46:09Sen. Hawley: I believed that until I asked my son to write -- my son asked a plot son to write -- my son asked a -- chatgpt to write the plot of a david baldacci novel. I felt like somebody backed up a truck to my imagination and had stolen everything I had ever written.
▶ 0:46:35Sen. Hawley: I am aware that what ai has done is not different from an aspiring writer. That's flatly wrong. I was once an aspiring writer. My favorite novelist on a college was john irving. I read everything he wrote. None of my novels read remotely like a john irving novel. Unlike a ike, I can't -- ai I can't remember every detail.
▶ 0:47:03Sen. Hawley: And unlike ai I read other writers not to copy them or steal from them but because I love their stories. I appreciate their talent. It has motivated me to up my game. Ai takes what wad -- writers produce, and incredibly valuable shortcut, like super fuel to teach software what they need to know. These trillion dollar companies did not even buy my books.
▶ 0:47:27Sen. Hawley: They got them off a website that has pirated works but they claimed it would be difficult to license works from individual creators. Apparently it was more efficient to steal it. Trillion dollar companies did not have the resources to do things lawfully. I was once a trial lawyer. If I had made that argument at court I would have been laughed out of the courtroom or held in contempt by the judge, and rightly so. If ai companies only needed words, they could have said every dictionary in the world into machine learning but that would not be good enough.
▶ 0:47:57Sen. Hawley: It means decades of additional work and hundreds of billions of dollars of additional investment. What they needed was complete, well-crafted, living, breathing stories that his characters and that seemed real, plots that made sense, dialogue that appeared genuine. They needed us and our craft that we learned with the sweat of our brows and flexing our imaginations. These companies have stolen the labor to make enormous profits. We, the writers, the source of all this, will receive nothing.
▶ 0:48:30Sen. Hawley: Ai will allow anybody to order a novel written in the name of an established writer and the book can be sold at saying it reads just like a david baldacci novel. It doesn't read like my novel because it is my novel. It's my imagination. People complain about cheap, imported goods ruining american workers.
▶ 0:48:47Sen. Hawley: We have cheap books created by american technology flooding the markets meaning less revenue for publishers and less money to spend on new, emerging authors put online vendors now require disclosing if the book was not human created. They will have to limit the number of books a person can publish in a week -- on a weekly or daily basis. This is insane.
▶ 0:49:15Sen. Hawley: Source code and algorithms are also protected by copyright. I bet if I still any of the ai companies source codes and tried to profit off them they would unleash a tsunami of lawsuits against me. But if fair use is my entire body of work, there is no copyright protection left for anybody. Ai believes their ip should be protected against interlopers. I agree with them. I am deeply disappointed they don't feel the same about people like me.
▶ 0:49:44Sen. Hawley: The ai community is apparently entitled to steal our work product because what they are doing is so transformational. Let me tell you. Billions of people have been transformed by books. Many significant events in human history and this country had seminal authors that were ahead of the pack. We did not emerge from the dark ages until the invention of the printing press one books became widely available. Books teach empathy. They make the world a kinder, gentler, more meaningful place. I am only one man.
▶ 0:50:12Sen. Hawley: But books transformed my life, propelling me to a far better existence. I am sure there are aspects of ai that will also transform the world. If you want to bet on which side is more transformational for all of us I would bet on books every time. Thanks.
▶ 0:50:32Chair Hawley: Professor edward lee is a professor at the santa clara university of law where he has written extensively about the intersection of ai and copyright law.
▶ 0:50:44Mr. Lee: Chair hawley, ranking member durbin and other members of the subcommittee thank you for the opportunity to testify. I am a professor of law at the center care university school of law and a book author and photographer. My personal experience informs my scholarship and understanding of the importance of copyright to authors and artists across the country.
▶ 0:51:04Mr. Lee: In my testimony I will discuss whether using copyrighted works to train ai models is a fair use giving particular attention to two recent decisions in cases filed by book authors against anthropic and met part the novel question of law, which has important implications for U.S. national interest has sparked sharp disagreements among parties, stakeholders, and now, federal judges.
▶ 0:51:33Mr. Lee: As judge bevis noted in an earlier non-generative ai case the question is difficult. I want to stress the three points. First, I believe these judges correctly concluded the use of copies of works to train and ai model serves and hyatt -- a highly transformative purpose in developing a new technology under factor I of fair use. During training, and ai model is exposed to vast training materials.
▶ 0:52:04Mr. Lee: Typically, many millions of works come up through a process called deep learning. The model identifies the statistical relationships among words and with some parts of words, and thereby a nib -- enabling the model to conduct numerous functions including research, delivery of medical advice, generation of content, and so forth.
▶ 0:52:30Mr. Lee: As one judge concluded in his opinion "the purpose of meta's copying was to train its large paint -- large language models, innovative tools that are used to generate diverse text and perform a wide range of functions." the technology was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes. The history of ai development strongly supports this conclusion.
▶ 0:52:55Mr. Lee: It's important to understand why they are researchers at universities began training ai models on large data sets. This practice originated not at ai companies, not at big tech, but at universities where ai researchers discovered a key insight. Scaling or using larger and more diverse data sets actually worked. In developing and improving ai models.
▶ 0:53:25Mr. Lee: It was an achievement that escaped researchers for many years. This seminal breakthrough took decades to figure out. It has propelled the advances of ai we are witnessing today. Second, while I agree with the ultimate findings of fair use in both cases, it is important to remember fair use is fact specific and decided on a case-by-case basis.
▶ 0:53:51Mr. Lee: On some cases a transformative purpose in ai training might be outweighed by other factors. For example, an ai model that routinely produces outputs that are infringing, such as regurgitations might not be fair use even in the training of the model dude in deficient guardrails on the bottle. -- due to insufficient guardrails on the model.
▶ 0:54:18Mr. Lee: With the cases of anthropic and met bob at the judges concluded the plaintiffs did not show the models had produced any infringing outputs of the plaintiff's work. That can be appealed. It's the findings of both judges. My final point is the need for caution. Caution by the courts, cautioned by congress, and the states. I believe it is important to weigh the U.S. interests in ai innovation. President trump issued an executive order making U.S.
▶ 0:54:48Mr. Lee: Development in global leadership in ai a national priority. China has its own priority, and a plan. To surpass the united states and become a world leader in ai by 2030. The united states national priority in ai councils caution. In google versus oracle, and other technology fair use case of national importance, the U.S.
▶ 0:55:17Mr. Lee: Supreme court itself cautioned " given the rapidly changing technological, economic, and business-related circumstances, we believe we should not answer more than is necessary to resolve the parties dispute. The judges departed from this approach in some controversial parts of their opinions.
▶ 0:55:40Mr. Lee: I disagree with that suggestion on pirated books and judge trattoria suggestion on copyright as more fully elaborated on in my written statement. At this juncture I think the best approach is for congress to wait and see how other district courts, the courts of appeals, and in the U.S.
▶ 0:56:00Mr. Lee: Supreme court, resolve these difficult issues, including access to pirated shadow libraries in the many pending copyright law sits across the country.
▶ 0:56:17Sen. Hawley: Thank you for being here and thank you to all of our witnesses. Now we will have seven minute rounds of questioning. We will see if we can fit in a couple rounds depending on the time we have. I will start. Ms. viswanathan, let me see if we can drill down on some specifics. Mr. baldacci mentioned in his opening statement that ai could just feed dictionaries into their platforms to train them.
▶ 0:56:48Sen. Hawley: They don't do that. They prefer published, fully formed works. Why?
▶ 0:56:56Ms. Viswanathan: That's right. They learn syntax, structure, how we learn language. When you learn language, you don't just learn words. You don't just memorize notes. You learn about syntax. The point professor lee is making is correct. They need large data sets. More is better to learn predictive language models. However, more is not everything. It's not pirated works.
▶ 0:57:25Sen. Hawley: You said they are not buying the books. They aren't buying Mr. baldacci's book or anybody setting up your. They are getting them. They are stealing them. They are stealing them. They're pirating them from somewhere. If they aren't buying the books are stealing them out of libraries where they getting them?
▶ 0:57:44Ms. Viswanathan: The large repositories of materials available online are many. Some are illicit. Some are licit. The pirates materials are not listed. --licit. You don't go to pirate websites if what you want to do is legal. None of the works are licensed. No author has been compensated to date.
▶ 0:58:15Sen. Hawley: They go to these shadow libraries to get to the works illegally. By the time they go to the shadow library the works are already stolen. They have already stolen Mr. baldacci's books, professor lee's books. How did they get them? How does the company take possession of the particular work?
▶ 0:58:39Ms. Viswanathan: There is a process called torrington. Essentially, huge amounts of data stream to you and you get them. At the same time you can send them out at the same time. Uploading and downloading exist at the same time. It is a peer to peer process. Not only are you taking in pirated materials, you are distributing them.
▶ 0:59:03Ms. Viswanathan: The violation of copyright law exists at the reproduction of the works, at the making available of them by the pirate libraries, the dissemination of them and you are dumb sh -- dissemination of them, the generative in our company, as well.
▶ 0:59:17Sen. Hawley: So they are taking the works and distributing them as well through torrington -- torrenting. Is that legal?
▶ 0:59:29Ms. Viswanathan: Torrenting can be legal but in this case, it's not. I agree with judge also if they said, if you are taking it from pirate libraries, no way, that's not acceptable. One judge said it is not helping the pirate websites but it is. There is one in particular called anna's archive. They put on their website, generative ai companies, train on us.
▶ 1:00:00Ms. Viswanathan: You can make us a donation too. It is helping pirate websites thrive and proliferate.
▶ 1:00:10Sen. Hawley: Have there been criminal enforcement against the pointing platforms?
▶ 1:00:15Ms. Viswanathan: It's like a game of walkable.
▶ 1:00:19Sen. Hawley: What is the key to criminal enforcement? Civil versus criminal in this context. When do we have a criminal case against joint -- torrenting?
▶ 1:00:36Ms. Viswanathan: What is criminal? Criminal copyright liability has two prongs. You have to do it willfully and for commercial advantage or gain. Prong two is met. Meta is not doing this out of the venice of its heart. Prong one is you have to know what you are doing is illegal. There is lots, particularly from the meta case that shows what they are doing is illegal.
▶ 1:01:11Ms. Viswanathan: Not only did he do it knowing it was illegal he did it willfully and intentionally. For this to be willful you have to know what you are doing is wrong. This meets that prong. This amounts to what you would call criminal copyright liability.
▶ 1:01:29Sen. Hawley: Let me ask about the willful aspect, talking about meta in particular. They are one of the biggest monopolists in the world and one of the biggest ai companies in the world is not the biggest. Let's talk about them for a second. Meta uses torrents to acquire pirated data for its model, correct?
▶ 1:01:52Mr. Pritt: Correct.
▶ 1:01:52Sen. Hawley: How much data would you estimate that has tormented -- meta as torrented?
▶ 1:02:05Mr. Pritt: Well over 200 terabytes of copyrighted material from -- I don't call them shadow libraries, but they are -- because they aren't libraries. But innocent critical enterprises.
▶ 1:02:19Sen. Hawley: How much does it pay copyright holders for the works it is used?
▶ 1:02:26Sen. Hawley: If nothing, zero, billions of works like Mr. baldacci's, zero payment. If meta were to pay, do you have any idea what the cost might be? To your knowledge, and discovery, did they ever explore pain? Is there a sense of how that -- how much of this may have cost them?
▶ 1:02:48Mr. Pritt: Early on they explored licensing and assigned two individuals part time to license. They decided it would take too long. That is when they turned to piracy. At the time, they had public documents that showed certainly tens of millions if not hundreds of millions had been contemplated for licensing at that time.
▶ 1:03:13Sen. Hawley: Hundreds of millions of dollars is the value, may be the base, the bear value of the works they have used, like the works you have written on the panel. Hundreds of millions and they paid a zero -- they paid zero. Did meta know what they were doing is wrong? Do you believe in the evidence you have seen? Was there any evidence that suggested meta employees knew what they were doing was illegal? Let's look at a few documents.
▶ 1:03:43Sen. Hawley: I will ask you to help me interpret. We will start here with a meta engineer working on their ai projects. She says "I don't think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line there. I feel like using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold.
▶ 1:04:12Sen. Hawley: They are distributing content to that is protected by copyright and they are infringing it. How do you read this? Does this look like knowledge to you?
▶ 1:04:23Mr. Pritt: That is what we have argued in the case.
▶ 1:04:28Sen. Hawley: Let's look at another medal employee in the same chat. "it is the piracy and us knowing and being accomplices that is the issue." this is a meta engineer working on their ai projects. It is the piracy. And us being knowing accomplices that is the issue. Let's look at another one.
▶ 1:04:56Sen. Hawley: Here is the response that another medal engineer in the same chat gave. "well, we want to buy books and be nice, open people here. However, to make it happen, not letting the bad guys win, we need to make a case fast and cut some corners here and there." we need to cut some corners here and there. What are we looking at here? Is this knowledge of illegal activity?
▶ 1:05:27Mr. Pritt: When they refer to bad guys I think they are referring to openai and other ai competitors. But yes, this is one of the many documents that show they knew these were pirated websites that contained copyrighted materials and they were taking them for free.
▶ 1:05:45Sen. Hawley: Here we have it in black-and-white. Don't believe me. Read the evidence. Meta's own engineers and employees saying they know what they are doing is ethically wrong, illegal, likely to subject them to legal liability and they are doing it anyway because they need the money. There is a lot more here. We will come back. I want to give senator durbin a chance to ask questions.
▶ 1:06:10Sen. Durbin: I want to ask startup questions. Mr. baldacci, a number of authors have shared with the public the process that you undergo to write a book. I believe john irving and my imaginary girlfriend is that good john mcphee has done that in the past. Stephen king has done that in the past. Give us an insight now that you have published successfully in volume what the process is of writing a novel.
▶ 1:06:40Mr. Baldacci: One, you have to be in love with wear down to storytelling because that is the essence of what you're trying to create. You draw upon your own experiences, curiosities, the people you have met, things that happened to you, places you traveled. Human experience is that a software platform cannot replicate. If it ever manages to do it, I want another planet to live on, frankly. For me, it was 20 years of hard work and learning the craft before I was ever published at all.
▶ 1:07:11Mr. Baldacci: I started writing short stories and read them for 15 years in college and law school and tried to get them published and was not successful. It is a craft you build over time. You have a lot of frustration and dips and valleys. Good times happen. Bad times happen. Rejections happen.
▶ 1:07:30Mr. Baldacci: You learn from them and keep going and at the end of the day hopefully you get good enough to where somebody who has the ability to make your career happened will read your material and respond and then you can hopefully write for a living and that is what happened to me after a long period of incubation. You don't see a lot of young writers or teenage writers making it big because writing is about life. You have to have something to write about. It takes a long time.
▶ 1:07:57Mr. Baldacci: That is why I felt when my sun brought this up, where every single one of my books was presented to me in an outline in like three seconds, it really felt like I had been robbed of everything that I had worked on my entire adult life. Now it is in the possession of somebody else, that I don't know, that writes their books that are actually my books. That is not supposed to happen in this country and its enraging to me.
▶ 1:08:28Mr. Baldacci: I license my work on over the world, for different foreign publishers, for television, movies, all types of endeavors. I'm open to any offer. If somebody comes to me and wants to license my work, I listen to them and we can negotiate something agreeable for both parties and they can use my work in the parameters of the licensing agreement. Life can go on and people can be happy.
▶ 1:08:52Mr. Baldacci: But stealing stuff from pirated sites operated in russia just so you can gain an advantage, and you don't really care what happens to the likes of me or other writers coming up. I make a lot of money firm -- from my publisher. My publisher takes that money to take a risk on writers coming up. So, you hurt all other writers coming behind us.
▶ 1:09:19Sen. Hawley: In the creative process of writing aut process of writing a novels -- writing novels and other things do you police against plagiarism?
▶ 1:09:33Mr. Baldacci: My ideas are my ideas and nobody has the mindset or experiences I have and I don't have the mindset or experiences of other people. I never worry I will take something away from another writer, because my stories are my own. That is why a software platform, the only thing they can do is take from what has already been created. They can't really create anything on their own. They take my mishmash and throw it out the other hand, but it still looks like my stuff, because it is my stuff.
▶ 1:10:07Sen. Durbin: Part of your argument you are suggesting this is the age of innovation and deep learning and it deserves special treatment. We have been through this argument in congress before. Section 230 is a good illustration of that. We decided this fledgling industry called the internet might not have a future so we exempted them from liability. Is that what you are suggesting? Lee popped not at all.
▶ 1:10:36Sen. Durbin: My suggestion is we should pay heed to the existing supreme court precedents on fair use which repeatedly state that fair use is a flexible doctrine decided on a case-by-case manner. There is a way for authors to prove market harm based on a taking or the copying of protected elements of their work.
▶ 1:11:03Sen. Durbin: Judge alsup said if the authors show there is market harm based on an output of this model, you can bring another case. That is exactly, I think, the approach to strike the correct, as you mentioned earlier in your opening remarks, to strike the right balance between protecting copyrighted works and authors and protecting innovation.
▶ 1:11:30Sen. Durbin: Even just a story in emerson versus davies recognize not everything in a book is protected by copyright. Authors build on past books to write new books. It feels creation. Here, the line that judge chhabria and alsup drew in terms of noninfringing output -- excuse me, judge alsup.
▶ 1:12:00Sen. Durbin: There is no copyright claim in the production of noninfringing works.
▶ 1:12:07Sen. Durbin: It looks to me like you are shifting the burden to the author of the creative work. When it there is an assertion of fair use here. So meta or others can virtually steal the creative product of Mr. but archie and others -- Mr. baldacci and others that he has the responsibility to prove economic talk to him as a result?
▶ 1:12:33Sen. Durbin: Lee le-- please
▶ 1:12:42Le-- Plmr. Lee: The defendants in both cases proved there was no output of infringing work. Then, that case becomes, will the plaintiffs present contrary evidence? Neither judge found evidence of output that hady substantially similar copies of the plaintiff's work.
▶ 1:13:03Sen. Durbin: So, ultimately, the thievery, if you want to use that word, of the creative work, is for the economic benefit of those creating the ai, is it not?
▶ 1:13:16Mr. Lee: Not necessarily. If plaintiffs are able to prove cognizable market harm from the copying of their copyrighted expression, then, the fair use argument is likely to fail.
▶ 1:13:32Sen. Durbin: From a different angle, why do we have ar? Why are we interested in ai? Clear it is a commercial purpose, is it not?
▶ 1:13:45Mr. Lee: The ai companies, yes.
▶ 1:13:47Sen. Durbin: They are clearly the winners on any approach you are taking when you assume we are in a world of new innovation and there is a use of someone else's creative work. The burden is on them to prove they have lost money because of that piracy. The ultimate winner in this will be ai. If they escape this responsibility, they can use Mr. budd. Cheese product and make money off of it.
▶ 1:14:13Mr. Lee: If the training is considered of fair use the direct benefit would be to the ai companies. I grant that. In terms of larger national interest, it rebounds to the benefit of the united states. If we have a priority in ai development.
▶ 1:14:34Mr. Lee: If we are in competition or an arms race with china, winning the ai race by uaschair grassled the ai race by uaschair grasslei should be prepared to pay the price for that, right?
▶ 1:14:49Mr. Lee: I would suggest that if it is so easy to generate copies of Mr. baldacci's novels or any other author's, that should go in the complaint and these lawsuits and some of the lawsuits do allege infringing outputs. Those are yet to be resolved. My ultimate position is, we should not throw out the window the established supreme court precedents on how to apply fair use.
▶ 1:15:17Mr. Lee: It is case-by-case, flexible and balances the interests of both sides in terms of copyright as well as innovation.
▶ 1:15:29Sen. Durbin: Thank you. >> when you said it would be to the benefit of the U.S. isn't Mr. baldacci a citizen of the U.S.?
▶ 1:15:37Mr. Lee: It is hard to look at. I'm not saying Mr. baldacci does not benefit from the copyright --
▶ 1:15:45Sen. Hawley: Professor viswanathan is a citizen of the united states. When you say it will benefit, the mass theft of their works will benefit the U.S. you are saying the mass theft and impoverishment of U.S. citizens ultimately redounds to the good of america?
▶ 1:16:05Mr. Lee: Not at all, senator.
▶ 1:16:08Sen. Hawley: What you mean to say is that it will benefit american corporations. It may impoverish american citizens but in rich american corporations.
▶ 1:16:20Mr. Lee: There is a balance to be struck. Indeed, but you are waving the magic wand of if this will benefit the united states. I'm just trended drill down on your assertion. I think what you're saying is the enrichment of certain multinational corporations incidentally based in the united states taking the works and personal property of american citizens is a good thing. That is a little less clear to me.
▶ 1:16:49Mr. Lee: The way I view the national interests stated by president trump's second order is that there is a national priority in maintaining the united states dominance and leadership globally in ai and I would defer to the view of the ai czar david sachs who said if there is no pathway to fair use in ai training, we will lose the race with china.
▶ 1:17:18Sen. Hawley: You think we should allow an unelected ai czar to decide the rights of american citizens?
▶ 1:17:26Mr. Lee: No, I would let the courts decide all of these disputes and there are presently 44 lawsuits around the country so this is not a time for congress to intervene in terms of deciding these very difficult --
▶ 1:17:43Sen. Hawley: It sounds strange to me to say that the united a nation is going to benefit from the mass violations of its citizens rights but I thought what made us a nation was common citizenship, things we agree on together. Your argument seems to be it is fine to violate those rights en masse.
▶ 1:18:09Sen. Hawley: You're saying certain people in the nation and their immediate interest. Another thing, fair use. Just a second, I have limited time. Fair use you said is a flexible doctrine. It is an equitable doctrine and these people are not coming to this with clean hands, are they? They are coming to claiming fair use after they have stolen Mr. baldacci work.
▶ 1:18:35Sen. Hawley: They did not take it from the library, license it or buy it, they went to a pirated, illegal site and took it and now they are coming and now they are coming in claiming the cover of equity. That seems strange, isn't it? Is that how equitable law works?
▶ 1:18:48Mr. Lee: That is the very question, the initial accusation, whether that was justified as fair use and the two judges disagreed on how to treat that initial acquisition from the shadow libraries. I think it would be incorrect for us to assume it is necessarily a violation and the supreme court in google v.
▶ 1:19:20Mr. Lee: Workall had an opportunity to discuss or require considerations of bad faith in the good use analysis and rejected that opportunity and even cited the judge's influential fair use article saying fair use is not permitted of the well behaved.
▶ 1:19:40Sen. Hawley: You're making his arguments very gamely, that is helpful to have this debate. I want to point out there seems to be a lot of handwaving. Every time we get down to the question can these giant corporations take the copyrighted work of individual citizens, we get distracted with, it is for the good of the country, may be does not so bad, we have an arms race on, there is an ai czar.
▶ 1:20:12Sen. Hawley: I don't think it is that complicated. It is simple. In america we have rights that protect us and these are being violated. If we are going to succeed as a nation and uphold our principles we better darn well uphold the rights upon which the nation is founded. Just a thought. Senator welch, would you like to catch him offguard? [laughter] you're welcome to ask questions if you would like.
▶ 1:20:46Sen. Welch: , mid-expression of righteous outrage and indignation of which I am aligned, so thank you very much. I appreciate calling this hearing because this is incredibly important.
▶ 1:21:02Sen. Welch: Senator blackburn and I have a bill called the train act and it is trying to address this question of artistic content being used and we have a celebrated author here and it would checked you but what I appreciate about you being here Mr. baldacci, a lot of folks are aspiring to be a david baldacci. There are a lot of artists aspiring to be a taylor swift.
▶ 1:21:31Sen. Welch: It is the folks who made it who are in position to advocate. I don't think it will benefit you, but it will benefit artists who have so much to contribute, even though they are not yet discovered. This is the reality, where I think the chairman is really right. The ai companies don't care where content comes from, it is just a voracious, insatiable appetite, and they will go into copyrighted material. We just know that.
▶ 1:22:04Sen. Welch: To suggest they won't is naïve. The question and the burden is, that is going into copyrighted material. The artist has the right to have that copyright respected. The burden is, how do you know they used it?
▶ 1:22:21Sen. Welch: That is the whole point of the train act where, if there is copyright infringement, a reasonable assertion of that and suspicion of it will require disclosure on the part of the ai platform. I wanted to ask a little bit about that and I will start with you, Mr. baldacci. You have any suspicion that some of your works have been used to train ai systems?
▶ 1:22:46Mr. Baldacci: I have been told and shown a database, I'm part of a class-action lawsuit against the ai community and I think they conceded that they have taken at least 44 of my into their large language models.
▶ 1:23:03Sen. Welch: It is astonishing.
▶ 1:23:06Mr. Baldacci: At least they did not take them all, so that is nice.
▶ 1:23:10Sen. Welch: Just wait. [laughter] so you don't know for sure, and the only way you will find out is hopefully through this class action litigation your part of?
▶ 1:23:21Mr. Baldacci: I learned that when my son put into chatgpt that it was intimately familiar with my entire body of work because it was able to throw out plot took from many of my novels. Someone had to feed my novels into chatgpt, otherwise it could not have created that response.
▶ 1:23:42Sen. Welch: We just can't allow that. That is really wrong. Thank you. We are in agreement that we need reforms for the artist. Mr. smith, music, it is the same situation. Our music industry is so important. Using the word industry is wrong. Music is so important. It helps people get a sense of who they are, it helps people connect, and it is across political divisions.
▶ 1:24:13Sen. Welch: That is one of the inspiring things about the incredible contributions musicians provide to our society. Can you explain what the dangers are of allowing ai models to freely train off of copyrighted works?
▶ 1:24:30Mr. Smith: There are multiple dangers. What we have seen in the early piracy research is, article one section eight clause eight is a really good idea. Giving artists incentives to create actually yields more creation. When artist incomes are lowered through piracy they have lower incentives to create.
▶ 1:24:53Mr. Smith: I think we see the same thing here are directly by participating in these pirated networks. The generative ai companies are making it easier for other people to steal but indirectly they are also making it harder for licenses to be signed. Mr. baldacci talks about signing licenses but when you sign a license with a generative ai company you are signing with a gun to your head because they can say, either sign what I'm offering or I will steal it instead.
▶ 1:25:24Sen. Welch: That is the adhesion contract for good lawyers like senator hawley still remember from law school. This is where all of us have appreciation for young artists. They have a vision that there is something inside them that they can express and it will make a difference to people who hear it, or people who read it.
▶ 1:25:51Sen. Welch: They start out, against their parents will most of the time, because it is not an income producing promising career. A lot of them don't succeed with commercial success, but they are contributing in a local community, to a sense that helps develop our culture and create respect for the creative process.
▶ 1:26:17Sen. Welch: It helps create respect that there are other things than the career path some of us up here have followed where you can make a real and meaningful contribution. This is the concern I have about how this ai grabbing will make it tougher for those folks against great odds to keep at it.
▶ 1:26:39Sen. Welch: May be from your experience you can talk about how that would adversely impact any chance they have of being able to pay their bills at the end of the month while trying to create inspirational music for the benefit of all of us.
▶ 1:26:50Mr. Smith: I deeply sure that concern, senator. It is based on peer-reviewed academic research showing that creed of output goes down when piracy is allowed to flourish.
▶ 1:27:09Mr. Smith: I worry that the future david baldaccis of the world will not get through that hump and we will not appreciate their creative output if we allow piracy to be used to continue to train these generative ai models.
▶ 1:27:24Sen. Welch: Thank you. My time is about up. I want to thank the witnesses. This is an extraordinarily important issue. I yield back.
▶ 1:27:37Sen. Durbin: Mr. pritt, you have a lawsuit against meta that alleges copyright infringement upon the authors works. Do you have any idea how much meta as a company is valued?
▶ 1:27:50Mr. Pritt: That is a good question. Many trillions I believe.
▶ 1:27:55Sen. Durbin: Did meta compensate any of the copyright owners for their works?
▶ 1:28:01Mr. Pritt: No, but meta did spend money contributing its processing power to pirate from illicit websites and also to pay amazon to host pirated data.
▶ 1:28:15Sen. Durbin: Which of curse did not benefit your plaintiffs.
▶ 1:28:19Mr. Pritt: Certainly not.
▶ 1:28:21Sen. Durbin: How does the downloading and uploading of pirated copyrighted material affect the analysis of whether it means willfulness for criminal infringement, mens rea?
▶ 1:28:37Mr. Pritt: I will let the professors answer that question. As to willfulness in the civil copyright context, the documents senator hawley shows makes it clear the piracy committed by meta was knowing and intentional.
▶ 1:28:55Sen. Durbin: Anyone else want to comment on that?
▶ 1:28:59Mr. Lee: Yes, thank you. The standard of willfulness for criminal copyright infringement requires knowledge that it is illegal to engage in that particular copying. I don't want to relitigate what judge chhabria has already ruled on, but he was given all this evidence that was submitted by Mr. pritt and his colleagues.
▶ 1:29:28Mr. Lee: He saw the comments by engineers, but he also saw comments and analysis by lawyers of meta advising them on whether this was permitted or not under fair use law and judge chhabria made a determination the crime fraud exception did not apply and I am not privy to all the analysis judge chhabria made but I'm assuming it was based on the question not being resolved.
▶ 1:29:58Mr. Lee: The legal question of whether accessing or copying from a pirated website to serve a highly transformative purpose is the very question raised in the lawsuit. There was no prior precedent that has so held that it is piracy or illegal, let alone criminal infringement, to do that. That is the very question judge chhabria ruled on.
▶ 1:30:27Mr. Lee: To assume it is piracy is begging the question, with all due respect, begging the question that the courts are the appropriate determiners and that can be appealed and I'm sure it will be appealed, but here the question of whether requiring for a fair use purpose is unlawful, judge chhabria ruled
▶ 1:30:57Mr. Lee: It was not it was for developing the ai model. I believe it is supported by the text of section 107.
▶ 1:31:04Chair Grassley: Professor viswanathan, would you like to comment?
▶ 1:31:09Ms. Viswanathan: I would, thank you p the fact we are talking about this behavior as to whether or not it is criminal. The very fact we are here talking about willful, knowing, intentional, massive scale training on pirated materials, let's just step back a moment from the question of whether it comes under criminal copyright infringement. Does it come under fair use at all? Is this what fair use was developed to be?
▶ 1:31:38Ms. Viswanathan: Fair use for those of us who do not take my copyright class, sorry about that, fair use is an affirmative defense. Yes, I infringed, but I did it for a good reason, a societally beneficial reason. May be creating a repository is that but it does not seem to me that it squares with the other things we think of as fair use. What is well-established fair use?
▶ 1:32:08Ms. Viswanathan: Education, criticism, commentary, first amendment purposes we consider valuable and necessary that are done in good faith. I educate in good faith. I don't want to have to clear all those copyrights to educate. Great, we allow you to do that. That is not what is going on here.
▶ 1:32:26Ms. Viswanathan: I don't want to relitigate the cases, professor lee, but judge chhabria was clearly distressed by this and when he raised the possibility, as you rightly say indicta, that market dilution is what is happening, he says exactly what the senator was talking about, what Mr. baldacci was talking about, flooding the market with subpar works that substitute for the original works. This is not what fair use was intended to achieve or to facilitate.
▶ 1:32:56Ms. Viswanathan: The very fact these companies are arguing we are in good faith, we are doing fair use purposes, to me this should not even be a defense they are allowed to raise. But ok they will raise it and it will be litigated, but boy, it just does not seem consistent with what fair use was ever meant to do.
▶ 1:33:15Chair Grassley: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. chairman.
▶ 1:33:20Sen. Hawley: Mr. pritt, if I could ask you another question or two about the evidence. We talked about meta engineers who talked about how they were realizing they were crossing an ethical line and cutting corners. Did meta ever try to hide the fact it was pirating these works?
▶ 1:33:41Mr. Pritt: What the document shows, in 2024, when meta used anna's archive it decided intentionally not to use its own servers and instead to go through amazon web services in order to ensure the seeding, the sharing of pirated works, would not be traced back to meta's own ip.
▶ 1:34:04Sen. Hawley: Does not sound to me like a company and executives that think what they are doing is aboveboard. It sounds like a company that thinks what they are doing is probably illegal in some manner, but want to go on doing it anyway. Let me show you a couple documents to understand what we are seeing. These are more meta engineers working on ai.
▶ 1:34:25Sen. Hawley: We have the first one who says, not sure we can use meta's ip's to load through torrents pirate content, haha. These are all of their comments. For all of professor lee's comments that we are not sure if it is pirated or not, based -- they thought so. This is meta. Meta thought so.
▶ 1:34:52Sen. Hawley: Next employee, I'm curious to look at samples but I feel we should get more clarity on what is allowed and how, smile emoji. The other ,yeah, torrenting from a corporate laptop does not feel right. What are we looking at? Is this an attempt to be aboveboard, forthcoming and they think everything is fine?
▶ 1:35:14Mr. Pritt: That is a difficult -- Mr. lee: that is a -- >> that is difficult. With respect to professor lee as I am still litigating the case against meta, judge chhabria specifically declined to decide whether meta's piracy, what it engaged in in terms of the downloading, the making available, the making additional copies in sending those copies, over 40 terabytes of data to
▶ 1:35:44Mr. Pritt: Other individuals, is in fact fair use and no court, including the supreme court, has ever held that rank piracy is somehow fair use. Instead, the supreme court case law, still the law of the land, says fair use presupposes good faith and fair dealing. I will leave it to you whether you think any of these documents show good faith and fair dealing.
▶ 1:36:14Sen. Hawley: Let's look at one other document and ask ourselves if this looks like wood faith and fair dealing. More meta employees and ai engineers. Frank, can you clarify why we can't use facebook internal for this again? He says we have to avoid the risk of tracing back the seeder from a facebook server. Andy clarifies avoiding the risk of tracing back the seeder or downloader from facebook servers.
▶ 1:36:45Sen. Hawley: Here we have meta employees say they know they are pirating, they think it is ethically wrong, illegal, and they are actively avoiding trying to create a paper trail. They are trying to hide it. That does not sound like fair use to me. Does that sound like fair use to you, professor lee?
▶ 1:37:02Mr. Lee: I would say I agree with chhabria's approach to the distribution claim is still live in the case. This aspect of the tormenting --torrenting may well be fair use.
▶ 1:37:17Sen. Hawley: If this is not infringement, if the answer is that the biggest corporation in the world worth trillions of dollars can come take individual authors work like Mr. baldacci, lie about it, hide it, profit off it and there is nothing our law does about that, we need to change the law. If nothing else comes out of the hearing today hope that is it and I hope this is motivation to this body that we need to be paying attention to what is going on here. Mr.
▶ 1:37:45Sen. Hawley: Baldacci said he would rather live on a different planet if there was ai that could write your books. I'm sure that will never happen, they will never write your books. I want to live on a different planet if this can go on and is perfectly legal. We have to do something about this. [applause] let me just ask you, Mr. pritt, what about mark zuckerberg and all of this? Do we think zuckerberg knew about this, approved this? What does the evidence suggest?
▶ 1:38:11Mr. Pritt: Certainly the documents that have become public in the case explain that the decision whether or not to use library genesis, in notorious illicit marketplace for example, for actual training as opposed to exploration, was escalated to mark zuckerberg.
▶ 1:38:31Sen. Hawley: And I think the judge said something to this effect. Let's look here, if we got it. That in fact zuckerberg was asked about it. There it is, spring of 2023 after failing to acquire licenses and following escalation up to zuckerberg meta decided to use the works acquired from a torrenting platform as training data, so they just did it anyway. Forget it, don't pay Mr.
▶ 1:39:00Sen. Hawley: Baldacci or anybody, it cost too much, a lot cheaper to take it for free and then make billions of dollars off of it. I will conclude with this. I want to thank all the witnesses for their testimony. Senator welch if you have more questions of senator durbin I'm happy to let you ask those. I think this is a moral issue as much as anything else. This is an issue about who are we going to be as a country? Are we going to be a country as written into our constitution, we protect our rights as americans.
▶ 1:39:31Sen. Hawley: This makes us americans and we welcome the accretive genius of Mr. baldacci and the marvelous viewpoints and perspectives that have come to characterize our country. Are we going to protect that or allow a few megacorporations to vacuum it all up, digested, and make billions of dollars in profits, may be trillions, and pay nobody for it? That is not american. That is not our country.
▶ 1:39:57Sen. Hawley: I'm all for the free market and I'm glad zuckerberg can make his billions, but that is fine. But not by running over Mr. baldacci or anybody else or any other young author trying to make as start, or just a working guy who put something on facebook. Why should all his stuff get taken? It is wrong, morally wrong. Frankly it is not consonant with our simple -- principles as americans. We should do better than that. Senator welch, senator durbin?
▶ 1:40:28Sen. Hawley: I want to thank the witnesses for being here. I know you had to travel far for this. Thank you again for accommodating our schedule. Thanks to everyone who has been here today and with that we will stand adjourned. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap.org]