In copyright lawsuits over AI training, Meta has spent weeks blaming staff for downloading torrents. The company has now been ordered to name executives who authorized decisions to pirate books from shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive and LibGen, TorrentFreak reported. In a discovery order impacting a class action raised by book authors—including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman—as well as a lawsuit from publisher Entrepreneur Media, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon largely agreed that Meta must clearly identify key decision-makers.
Following testimony from Meta staff who downloaded torrents, the order could expose a wider range of supervisors, managers, and executives whom staffers said greenlit the piracy. Meta had been hoping to avoid detailing the chain of command, particularly for leadership involved in early AI training. According to a Meta court filing, its initial efforts to compile massive AI datasets were managed through an “informal approach” where supposedly nobody with authority made any decisions.
Instead, Meta insisted that a “decision” was “made only in the sense” that some staffers “technically” downloaded torrents. Authors and publishers have argued that Meta made a willful choice to induce infringement by downloading and illegally distributing their copyrighted works. Since torrenting depends on a swarm of users, Meta could not have quickly downloaded 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen or 35.7 terabytes through Anna’s Archive if the company wasn’t also seeding, authors have argued. (Meta has argued that it relied on “mitigations” to prevent seeding.) Meta’s efforts to scapegoat staff seem to ignore that staff expressed discomfort in being directed to pirate work.
In the past year, authors’ lawsuits have exposed internal messages in which staff pushed back or rejected directions on torrenting, including one worker who commented that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.” Another staffer testified that he initiated downloads that “required some director or VP level approval to use for training,” a joint letter from Entrepreneur Media and Meta noted. There was also a time when leadership halted, then resumed, downloading torrents sourced from Anna’s Archive, another staffer testified. And while Meta has argued that communications that might identify who specifically authorized certain torrenting instances are privileged, at least one string of unredacted messages unsealed early last year allegedly showed that the decision to download from LibGen, for example, occurred after “a prior escalation to MZ” (Mark Zuckerberg).
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