Judge orders Meta to name executives tied to book torrenting claims

In short: A judge ordered Meta to identify which executives and managers approved downloading pirated books that were later used for AI training.

What happened

A US magistrate judge, Thomas Hixon, ordered Meta to name the people who “made, authorized, or approved” decisions to get books from so called shadow libraries, including Anna’s Archive and LibGen. Shadow libraries are online collections of pirated books.

The order affects two related cases, a class action from authors and a lawsuit from publisher Entrepreneur Media. The plaintiffs say Meta used torrents to download huge amounts of copyrighted material. Torrents are a way to share files by pulling pieces from many computers at once, like getting pages of a book from lots of different printers.

Meta has argued that no one in leadership “decided” to pirate books, and that downloads happened through an informal process carried out by staff. The judge was not persuaded by that narrow framing. He said the requests were not limited to formal decisions, and Meta must provide clearer answers about who approved getting the data.

The judge also ordered Meta to produce command history files for every server Meta used for torrenting, including virtual machines and AWS instances. These are activity logs, like a detailed record of what commands were run on a computer.

Why it matters

These lawsuits could shape how AI companies use books and other copyrighted work for training. For regular people, the outcome may affect what future AI tools can legally learn from, and whether creators get paid or protected when their work is used.

Source: Arstechnica