At a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Sen. Hawley on Tuesday (July 16), legal experts accused AI companies such as Meta<\/strong> and Anthropic<\/strong> of outright piracy in their efforts to hoover up as much data as possible for their generative AI tools.<\/p>\n \u201cAs AI companies scrambled to outpace each other, many of them turned to illegal pirate websites \u2013 massive repositories of tens of millions of stolen copyrighted works \u2013 to get text for their AI models,\u201d lawyer Maxwell Pritt<\/strong> of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP<\/strong> told the subcommittee.<\/p>\n \u201cBy pirating these works for free rather than buying or licensing them from copyright owners, AI companies have built a multibillion-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.\u201d<\/p>\n Pritt accused the US\u2019s leading AI companies of \u201cwhat is likely the largest domestic piracy of intellectual property in our nation\u2019s history. That piracy includes hundreds of terabytes of data and many millions of works, including, for example, at least 12 books authored by members of this subcommittee.\u201d<\/p>\n Pritt, who said he\u2019s litigating cases against AI companies such as Meta, OpenAI<\/strong>, GitHub<\/strong> and Midjourney<\/strong>, said company documents show that, at Meta, \u201cMark Zuckerberg<\/strong> himself made the call\u201d to pirate vast amounts of copyrighted material.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, documents at Anthropic \u2013 which is fighting a copyright infringement case<\/a> brought by music publishers including Universal Music Group<\/strong> \u2013 \u201cshow a blatant disregard for our copyright laws, preferring to pirate books to avoid or delay the \u2018legal\/practice\/business slog,\u2019 as Anthropic\u2019s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei<\/strong> put it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs AI companies scrambled to outpace each other, many of them turned to illegal pirate websites \u2013 massive repositories of tens of millions of stolen copyrighted works \u2013 to get text for their AI models.\u201d<\/p>\n Maxwell Pritt, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Pritt presented internal communications from Meta showing staff were aware that their practices were illegal.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the piracy (and us knowing and being accomplices) that\u2019s the issue,\u201d one Meta employee was quoted as saying, while another wrote: \u201cIf there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as [book piracy site] LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.\u201d<\/p>\n Sen. Hawley made no secret of where he stands on the issue.<\/p>\n \u201cAI companies are training their models on stolen material, period\u2026 And we\u2019re not talking about these companies simply scouring the internet for what\u2019s publicly available. We\u2019re talking about piracy,\u201d Sen. Hawley said<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAre we going to protect [Americans\u2019 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 \u2013 maybe trillions \u2013 and pay nobody for it? That\u2019s not America.\u201d<\/p>\n Hawley\u2019s stance places him at odds with President Trump, who has been seen as siding with tech companies in the AI race. The Republicans\u2019 recent \u201cBig Beautiful Bill\u201d initially included a provision that would have prevented US states from regulating AI at the state level, before being stripped out of the bill<\/a>.<\/p>\n In many of the lawsuits filed by copyright holders, AI companies are defending themselves by claiming that their unauthorized use of copyrighted content amounts to \u201cfair use\u201d under US copyright law. Two recent rulings by federal judges came down on opposite sides of that argument.<\/p>\n In a case brought by book authors against Anthropic, Judge William Alsup<\/strong> of the US District Court for the Northern District of California concluded that Anthropic\u2019s unauthorized use of the books did indeed count as \u201cfair use\u201d<\/a> \u2013 but its use of pirated books did not count as fair use. Anthropic will now have to face a hearing to determine the size of the damages it must pay.<\/p>\n \u201cAre we going to protect [Americans\u2019 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 \u2013 maybe trillions \u2013 and pay nobody for it? That\u2019s not America.\u201d<\/p>\n Sen. Josh Hawley<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Days later, in a case brought by comedian Sarah Silverman<\/strong> and other book authors against Meta, Judge Vince Chhabria<\/strong> of the same district court concluded that training AI models on copyrighted content taken without permission is not<\/em> fair use<\/a> \u2013 though he ruled against Silverman and the other authors on the grounds that they had made the wrong arguments to prove their case.<\/p>\n David Sacks<\/strong>, President Trump\u2019s AI and crypto czar, has come down on the side of the judge in the Anthropic case who ruled in favor of the \u201cfair use\u201d argument.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/files\/2025\/07\/Screenshot-2025-07-17-at-20.24.47-80x62.jpg)
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