Judge Orders Meta to Name Executives Who Approved Book Piracy for AI Training

A federal magistrate has ordered Meta to identify the executives who authorized downloading books from shadow libraries, a decision that could pull senior leadership - possibly including Mark Zuckerberg - into copyright lawsuits over AI training data.

Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson largely sided with authors and publishers seeking to pierce Meta's chain of command, TorrentFreak reported. The order covers a class action by writers including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, and a separate suit from publisher Entrepreneur Media.

The discovery fight matters because the plaintiffs argue Meta made a deliberate choice to infringe, not a clerical mistake. Meta has spent weeks pinning torrent downloads on staff, describing its dataset-building as an "informal approach" in which no one with authority actually decided anything - a "decision" only in the sense that employees "technically" downloaded files.

Internal messages undercut that framing. One worker wrote that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right." Another testified the downloads "required some director or VP level approval." A third described leadership halting and later resuming downloads from Anna's Archive. One unredacted message string allegedly showed that a LibGen download decision followed a prior escalation to "MZ" - Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta has argued that communications identifying who authorized specific downloads are privileged. The judge's order pushes the company to name names anyway.

Source: Ars Technica