Nvidia’s ISP piracy defense backfires as judge refuses to dismiss copyright lawsuit over more than 197,000 pirated books — scripts in NeMo Framework allegedly ‘have no other purpose’ than to speed up infringement

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar has denied Nvidia’s request to dismiss a copyright infringement case filed against it, arguing that it’s not liable for how clients use its AI-powered NeMo Megatron Framework. According to TorrentFreak, Nvidia is asking the court to dismiss the direct copyright infringement claims that are connected to its use of the Bibliotik eBook torrent tracker, the Books3 dataset, and ‘The Pile’ dataset for language modeling. Nvidia then cited the Cox vs. Sony ruling, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a service provider is not liable for any piracy that its users might carry out.

Nvidia said that its NeMo Megatron Framework has significant “non-infringing uses” and that it did not promote it as a piracy tool. This should fall under Justice Clarence Thomas’ decision saying, “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will used by some to infringe copyrights.” Unfortunately for the company, Judge Tigar disagreed with its argument, saying that it’s not the framework, but specific scripts within it that violated copyright rules.