Create 2025-01-22-Torstar.md

2025/2025-01-22-Torstar.md

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+To whom it may concern:
+
+RE: Cease and desist notice – copyright violation
+
+I am legal counsel to Torstar Corporation (“Torstar”), parent company of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
+(“TSNL”) and Metroland Media Group Ltd. (“MMG”). This letter serves as notice that your website is
+hosting material that infringes the copyright of TSNL and MMG.
+
+In particular, your FineWeb dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb), described
+on your website as “a new, large-scale (15-trillion tokens, 44TB disk space) dataset for LLM pretraining”
+derived from “96 CommonCrawl snapshots” contains hundreds—if not thousands—of copyrighted works
+owned by TSNL and MMG. A full list of Torstar-owned domains is included as Schedule “A” to this letter
+(the “Domains”).
+
+TSNL and MMG respectively own the copyright in the content published on the Domains, including all
+headlines and articles. I have a good faith belief that the use of the material that appears within the FineWeb
+dataset is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or by operation of law.
+
+Your unauthorized reproduction of this material is therefore an infringement of our intellectual property
+rights, and we hereby demand that you immediately:
+
+1. cease and desist your unauthorized use of the content, and
+2. remove the infringing material from the FineWeb dataset.
+
+If we do not receive a satisfactory response from you by January 31, 2025, we will have no choice but to
+consider pursuing all legal remedies necessary to prevent your unauthorized activities. Torstar, TSNL, and
+MMG expressly reserve their respective rights and remedies.
+
+Please contact me at the email listed above indicating your prompt response.
+
+Sincerely,