The Pulse
Meta Must Name Staff Behind Shadow-Library Downloads
A federal judge ordered Meta to identify people who approved downloads from shadow libraries such as LibGen and Anna’s Archive. The discovery order also requires details about BitTorrent use, including decisions about seeding and efforts to
AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked ·
“If a decision is fairly attributable to a group or a team, everyone in the group or team who participated in making that decision is responsive to this rog.”
Thomas S. Hixson, U.S. magistrate judge
A federal judge has ordered Meta to identify the people who made or approved decisions to obtain copyrighted works from shadow libraries, including LibGen and Anna’s Archive. The October 19 discovery order says Meta must provide more than names: it must describe each person’s involvement, the decisions they took part in and the datasets involved. The ruling addresses information requested by publisher Entrepreneur Media in its copyright lawsuit against Meta.
Hixson rejects Meta’s “formal decision” limit
Meta argued that it had not identified particular people who formally approved some acquisitions for its Llama models. Magistrate Judge Hixson found that the request was not limited to formal decisions, and that Meta’s responses focused largely on how datasets were used rather than who decided to obtain or download them. The court ordered Meta to answer the question as asked, including identifying people who approved the LibGen acquisition within FAIR and the restart of an Anna’s Archive download—or to say under oath that it identified none.
Meta also said decisions could have been collaborative or reached by team consensus, without a single decision-maker. Hixson rejected that as a reason to narrow the response: when a decision belongs to a group, everyone who participated in making it must be identified. The order calls for each person’s approximate dates of involvement and the decision associated with each dataset.
The order reaches BitTorrent and seeding decisions
The judge granted part of Entrepreneur Media’s request for information about the use of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer protocols. Meta must identify people involved in discussions before employee Nikolay Bashlykov’s torrenting, those who approved proceeding by torrent, and those who directed or approved an April 2024 download by employee Ms. Wang. The company must also identify people who decided whether or how to seed files—or to take steps to limit seeding—when obtaining LibGen Scimag and Anna’s Archive material.
That discovery matters because BitTorrent users can upload pieces of files to other users while downloading them. In the litigation, authors and publishers have argued that Meta’s acquisition of large collections through the protocol involved distributing works as well as obtaining them. Ars Technica reported that plaintiffs cited 80.6 terabytes from LibGen and 35.7 terabytes from Anna’s Archive; those figures are plaintiffs’ arguments, not findings made in this order.
A discovery ruling, not an infringement verdict
The ruling compels Meta to provide information for the lawsuits; it does not decide whether the company infringed copyright or whether its use of works to train AI qualifies as fair use. Hixson granted the request for decision-makers but denied a separate request that Meta state whether it searched particular employees’ records and questioned their supervisors, finding that the request went beyond what the interrogatory asked.
The order also directs Meta to explain what happened to works that were downloaded but not used to train its models, a separate discovery issue in another of the related cases. For now, the concrete result is a wider account of who took part in the acquisition and handling of shadow-library material—including decisions made collectively, and decisions about whether downloaded files were shared back out.