Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting of Pirated Book Datasets
A US magistrate judge has ordered Meta to identify the employees who approved or authorized downloading pirated books from Anna's Archive and Library Genesis over BitTorrent, rejecting the company's position that no one formally signed off, according to a TorrentFreak report.
The order was issued by Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson. It follows a ruling last month in which Hixson required Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books, logs that could show how its torrent clients were configured, including any changes to upload settings.
The dispute stems from a lawsuit brought by Entrepreneur Media, publisher of Entrepreneur magazine, one of several cases filed against Meta. The publisher accuses the company of contributing to piracy by uploading, or seeding, works to third parties, a claim similar to one brought by authors.
Entrepreneur Media asked Meta to identify everyone who "made, authorized, or approved" the decisions to obtain shadow library datasets via BitTorrent. Meta named several people believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. But the company said it could not identify anyone who "formally" made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models, arguing those decisions were often reached by team consensus.
On the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads and described their choices as technical decisions. The company also said the acquisition of data from Anna's Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024 involving in-house lawyers. It did not 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 responded.
An internal Meta logbook, cited in the dispute, warned that using torrents would involve sharing copyrighted material. "Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay," the logbook stated.
Meta acknowledges downloading data from LibGen and Anna's Archive via BitTorrent but says no one "made, authorized, or approved" a decision to distribute the material, and that measures were taken to limit seeding. Its own expert previously estimated that uploads from Meta's AWS servers amounted to no more than roughly 30 percent of the data downloaded during a period in 2024.
Hixson was not convinced. He ordered the company to identify everyone involved in approving the downloads, including those who decided "whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding."