Judge orders Meta to name staff and executives who approved shadow-library torrenting
A US magistrate judge, Thomas Hixon, ordered Meta to identify the employees and executives who made, authorized or approved decisions to obtain or download shadow-library datasets such as LibGen and Anna's Archive via BitTorrent, according to Ars Technica and cnBeta. The order stems from a lawsuit by publisher Entrepreneur Media and also touches a class action by authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman; it covers people who discussed the downloads, approved BitTorrent use, and decided whether or how to upload files. Hixon rejected Meta's argument that no single decision-maker existed, and Meta must also produce command-history files for the servers it used to torrent, including virtual machines and AWS instances. The ruling is a discovery step only and does not decide whether Meta infringed copyright.
The order pushes Meta to document the chain of command behind AI training data acquisition from 2022–2024, a question at the center of the copyright suits, though it resolves no liability.
美国加州北区联邦地区法院法官托马斯·希克森10月19日下令，要求Meta说明哪些员工参与或批准了通过BitTorrent下载LibGen和Anna’s Archive等“影子图书馆”数据集的决定。披露范围不仅包括实际操作下载的人，也包括参与讨论、批准使用BT，以及决定是否向其他用户上传文件或如何减少上传行为的人员。
这项命令源于出版商Entrepreneur Media对Meta提起的诉讼。该公司出版《Entrepreneur》杂志，指控Meta通过BT下载图书，并在下载过程中向其他用户分享文件，因而协助传播未经授权的作品。Meta此前表示，相关下载由工程师执行，属于技术操作；公司没有找到正式作出下载决定的个人，数据使用决策往往由团队共同作出。法官指出，出版商询问的并不只是正式决策者，也包括团队中所有参与决定的人，因此Meta不能仅以“没有单一负责人”作为不披露理由。
#Meta#Entrepreneur Media#LibGen#Anna's Archive#Amazon Web Services#Llama