Submission + - Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna's Archive (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings. [...] The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.
Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim. To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.
Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued. When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.
Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. In other words, the company didn’t 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 countered.
Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim. To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.
Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued. When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.
Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. In other words, the company didn’t 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 countered.
