法官下令 Meta 披露批准使用 Torrent 下载盗版书籍的员工名单

Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive and LibGen

Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others.

Image 4: meta-logo Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books.

These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings.

The order is one of many discovery battles in the lawsuits over Meta’s use of shadow libraries. In the class action filed by authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, the court already ruled that training AI models on the books was fair use. That left the BitTorrent claims as the last live part of that case.

The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

‘Technical’ Decisions

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim.

To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued.

When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

Decision?
Image 5: Only in the sense

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers.

In other words, the company didn’t name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent.

“On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024,” Entrepreneur Media countered.

‘Legally Not Okay’

The question becomes more concrete when it comes to seeding. One of the engineers who torrented LibGen data previously testified that the issue of seeding was raised and discussed internally, and that steps were taken to limit it.

An internal Meta logbook, which one employee reviewed before starting a download from Anna’s Archive, mentions a decision not to use torrents.

“Decided to go with direct file uploads without using torrents for the following reasons: Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay,” the logbook reads, as quoted in Entrepreneur Media’s filing.

‘Legally not okay’
Image 6: Legally not okay

Meta does not deny that it used BitTorrent to download LibGen’s Scimag collection and data from Anna’s Archive. However, it says it isn’t aware of anyone who “made, authorized, or approved” a decision to upload or distribute the data. Meta’s lawyers also added that measures were implemented to avoid seeding.

How much data Meta shared with others is not clear either. Last year, Meta’s own expert estimated that uploads from its AWS servers didn’t exceed roughly 30% of the data downloaded during torrent downloads between April and July 2024.

Everyone in the Group

Yesterday, Judge Hixson ruled on the dispute. Two weeks earlier, Meta informed the court that it had no additional information to provide on the torrenting decision.

This didn’t convince the judge. He noted that the interrogatory isn’t limited to formal decisions, and that Meta’s answers were mostly about using the data, not obtaining or downloading it.

Meta’s argument that decisions were often collaborative doesn’t change that. The interrogatory asks about all decisionmakers, so if a decision was made by a team, everyone involved has to be named.

Everyone in the group
Image 7: Everyone in the group

Meta must also identify the people who took part in the discussion that preceded the 2023 LibGen torrent download. In addition, it has to name the people who approved going ahead with BitTorrent, and whoever greenlit the April 2024 download from Anna’s Archive.

Notably, the order also covers everyone who decided “whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding,” when Meta downloaded LibGen’s Scimag collection and Anna’s Archive through BitTorrent.

For Entrepreneur Media, these names are important. The publisher says the answers “bear on” willfulness, as well as on its contributory copyright infringement and distribution claims.

This dispute largely revolved around naming the people involved. Whether Meta’s torrenting was fair use, and whether it actually distributed pirated books to others, has yet to be decided.

—

A copy of Magistrate Judge Hixson’s order is available here (pdf). The joint letter briefs filed by Entrepreneur Media and Meta can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). Meta’s second supplemental interrogatory responses are available here (pdf).

法官下令 Meta 披露批准使用 Torrent 下载盗版书籍的员工名单

Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive and LibGen

‘Technical’ Decisions

‘Legally Not Okay’

Everyone in the Group

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