{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.hawley.senate.gov/chairman-hawley-exposes-big-techs-complicity-in-piracy-to-train-ai-models-willfulness-to-bankrupt-u-s-creative-community/", "Chairman Hawley Exposes Big Tech\u2019s Complicity in Piracy to Train AI Models & Willfulness to Bankrupt U.S. Creative Community", "2025-07-16", "2025", "2025-07", "Republican", "Senate", "MO", "Josh Hawley", "H001089", "www.hawley.senate.gov", "hawley", "https://www.hawley.senate.gov/press-releases/page/", "scraper", "Today, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) chaired a Judiciary subcommittee hearing revealing Big Tech\u2019s role behind the unchecked piracy of copyrighted content to fuel companies\u2019 artificial intelligence (AI) models. The hearing featured witness testimony from bestselling author David Baldacci as well as AI experts and law professors who lent credence to Senator Hawley\u2019s claim: AI companies, namely Meta, have crossed the line of technological innovation into corporate crime.\n\n\u201cToday\u2019s hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in American history. . . . AI companies are training their models on stolen material, period. . . . And we\u2019re not talking about these companies simply scouring the internet for what\u2019s publicly available. We\u2019re talking about piracy,\u201d Senator Hawley said.\n\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\u2014maybe trillions\u2014and pay nobody for it. That\u2019s not America,\u201d the Senator argued, explaining that the issue at hand is a moral one as much as a legal one.\n\nBaldacci went on to point out the harm mass piracy poses to America\u2019s authors, songwriters, and other creative producers, whose works are now in the crosshairs of Big Tech\u2019s lawlessness.\n\n\u201cEvery single one of my books was presented to me . . . in three seconds. It really felt like I had been robbed of everything of my entire adult life that I had worked on,\u201d Baldacci said.\n\nKey revelations uncovered during the hearing include:\n\nAI companies being trained on over 200 terabytes of copyrighted work\u2014or, in other words, billions of pages that would fill approximately 22 Libraries of Congress.\n\nBig Tech having pirated this work by illegally downloading it.\n\nAI companies having facilitated other actors\u2019 piracy by illegally uploading more than 50 terabytes of copyrighted works for others\u2019 use.\n\nMeta knowing it was engaging in illegal activity.\n\n\u2022 Employees internally warned each other that Meta\u2019s piracy was illegal\u2014and then brazenly made light of it.\n\n\u2022 Meta concealed its pirating via non-Meta servers, so its criminal acts would not be traced back to the company.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T18:48:13Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.hawley.senate.gov/chairman-hawley-exposes-big-techs-complicity-in-piracy-to-train-ai-models-willfulness-to-bankrupt-u-s-creative-community/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8100280538201332, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}