A federal magistrate judge has ordered Meta Platforms to disclose the names of all employees involved in decisions to use BitTorrent to download copyrighted books and academic papers from shadow libraries for its artificial intelligence training datasets.
The ruling marks the latest development in a high-stakes legal battle over intellectual property rights, AI training practices, and corporate accountability. The dispute centers on how Meta acquired massive datasets used to develop its prominent Llama family of large language models and whether the tech giant can be held liable for copyright infringement and unauthorized distribution.
Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the comprehensive command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These technical server logs are expected to reveal precisely how Meta’s torrent clients were configured, including whether any modifications were made to upload settings that could have contributed to the peer-to-peer distribution of copyrighted works.
While the server logs will shed light on the technical mechanics of what happened on Meta’s machines, publishers and authors are pushing for deeper corporate accountability. Chief among them is publisher Entrepreneur Media, which wants to know not just what happened, but who gave the green light.
‘Technical’ Decisions and Corporate Consensus
Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of several related lawsuits accusing Meta of contributing to digital piracy. The publisher alleges that Meta unlawfully uploaded—or seeded—protected works to third parties via BitTorrent while harvesting training data. This mirrors contributory copyright infringement claims brought by authors such as Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman in a separate class-action lawsuit.
Seeking to establish liability, Entrepreneur Media asked Meta to identify every individual who "made, authorized, or approved" the decisions to acquire shadow library datasets through BitTorrent.
In response, Meta identified several personnel who were generally involved in data-related operations. However, the company maintained that it could not identify anyone who "formally" made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two iterations of the Llama models. According to Meta, those strategic directions were typically the result of collective team consensus rather than a top-down executive directive.
When pressed specifically on the mechanics of torrenting, Meta pointed to the engineers who executed the downloads, describing their actions as routine technical decisions rather than policy directives. Furthermore, Meta noted that the acquisition of data from sources such as Anna’s Archive underwent an internal legal review in early 2024, managed by the company’s in-house legal department.
Crucially, Meta’s official responses stopped short of naming any senior executives or higher-level managers who authorized the use of BitTorrent technology.
Entrepreneur Media sharply criticized this defense in court filings. "On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024," the publisher countered.
‘Legally Not Okay’
The question of corporate authorization and internal awareness becomes starker when examining internal corporate communications regarding seeding. During earlier phases of discovery, an engineer who torrented data from Library Genesis (LibGen) testified that the legal and operational implications of seeding were raised internally and that specific steps were taken to mitigate the uploading of files to the wider BitTorrent network.
An internal Meta logbook reviewed by an employee prior to initiating a download from Anna’s Archive explicitly highlighted these concerns. According to excerpts cited in Entrepreneur Media’s court filings, the logbook noted a deliberate initial decision to avoid peer-to-peer networks.
"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 internal logbook read.
Despite such internal acknowledgments, Meta does not dispute that it ultimately utilized BitTorrent to download LibGen’s Scimag collection alongside data from Anna’s Archive. However, the company maintains that it remains unaware of any individual who formally "made, authorized, or approved" a decision to upload or distribute that material to outside parties. Meta’s legal counsel emphasized that technical safeguards were implemented specifically to avoid seeding.
The exact volume of copyrighted material shared with external peers remains a point of contention. Last year, an expert retained by Meta estimated that uploads originating from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers accounted for roughly 30% of the total data volume downloaded during torrent operations conducted between April and July 2024.
Everyone in the Group
The evidentiary dispute culminated in a ruling by Magistrate Judge Hixson. Weeks prior to the decision, Meta had informed the court that it possessed no additional information to provide regarding the internal decision-making process behind its torrenting activities.
Judge Hixson rejected Meta’s stance, pointing out that the interrogatories served by the plaintiffs were not restricted solely to formal, top-down executive decisions. The judge noted that Meta’s previous answers focused primarily on how the harvested data was ultimately utilized, rather than how it was initially acquired or downloaded.
Furthermore, the court dismissed Meta’s argument that decisions made through collaborative team consensus exempt the company from identifying responsible parties. Judge Hixson ruled that because the interrogatories specifically requested information on all decision-makers, Meta must name every individual involved when a decision was reached by a group or team.
Under the terms of the judge’s order, Meta must identify all participants who took part in the internal discussions preceding the 2023 LibGen torrent download. The company is also required to name the individuals who approved proceeding with BitTorrent technology, as well as those who greenlit the April 2024 data acquisition from Anna’s Archive.
Significantly, the judicial order extends to anyone who participated in decisions concerning "whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding," when Meta utilized BitTorrent to harvest the LibGen Scimag collection and Anna’s Archive.
For Entrepreneur Media and the broader coalition of plaintiffs, securing these names is vital. The publisher argues that establishing who knew what and when directly bears on the question of willfulness, which is central to its claims of contributory copyright infringement and unauthorized distribution.
While the wider legal landscape surrounding generative AI has seen courts grapple with complex doctrines—such as a recent ruling finding that training AI models on copyrighted books can constitute fair use under certain circumstances—the BitTorrent distribution claims remain a live and contentious issue. Judge Hixson’s ruling pushes the litigation past broad corporate denials, setting the stage for individual accountability as the discovery process moves forward.
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