Meta Must Name the Executives Behind Its AI Piracy, Judge Rules
A magistrate judge rejected Meta's attempt to pin torrenting decisions on rank-and-file staff, setting up a discovery fight that could reach Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta has spent weeks trying to pin its AI training piracy on the employees who clicked download. A federal magistrate judge just made that strategy a lot harder to pull off.
Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon ruled that Meta must clearly identify the executives and managers who authorized the company's use of pirated books from shadow libraries like Anna's Archive and LibGen, according to TorrentFreak. The order comes out of a discovery dispute in the ongoing copyright litigation over Meta's AI training practices, which includes a class action from authors such as Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, along with a separate suit from publisher Entrepreneur Media.
The ruling matters because it cuts against the narrative Meta has been building in court. In a filing, the company described its early approach to assembling massive AI training datasets as "informal," suggesting that no one with real authority actually decided to pirate anything. Meta's phrasing, as described in the filing, was that a "decision" was "made only in the sense" that some staffers "technically" downloaded torrents. In other words: nobody signed off, stuff just sort of happened.
Judge Hixon's order says otherwise. Following testimony from Meta employees who did the actual downloading, the court is now positioned to pull in a broader set of people, supervisors, managers, and executives who staffers say actually greenlit the piracy.
Why "nobody decided" doesn't hold up
The authors and publishers suing Meta argue this was never a case of low-level staff going rogue. Their claim is that Meta made a deliberate, willful choice to infringe their copyrights, and that the technical mechanics of the piracy prove it. Torrenting only works if enough users are simultaneously uploading pieces of a file to each other, a process called seeding. Given that Meta pulled down 80.6 terabytes of data through LibGen and 35.7 terabytes through Anna's Archive, the plaintiffs argue the company couldn't have moved that fast without seeding those files back out to other users itself. Meta has pushed back on that characterization, saying it used "mitigations" specifically to avoid seeding.
What's made Meta's "informal, nobody decided" framing even harder to sustain is the paper trail from its own employees. Internal messages surfaced in the litigation over the past year show staff explicitly uncomfortable with what they were being asked to do. One worker reportedly wrote that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right." Another testified that the downloads he initiated needed sign-off at the director or VP level before they could even be used for training, a detail noted in a joint letter filed by Entrepreneur Media and Meta.
There's also evidence of leadership actively managing the process rather than staying hands-off. One staffer testified that downloading from Anna's Archive was halted by leadership at one point, then resumed later, which is hard to square with a story about nobody being in charge.
The Zuckerberg thread
The most consequential detail may be a string of unredacted messages that were unsealed early last year. Those messages allegedly indicate that a decision to pull material from LibGen came only after what's described as "a prior escalation to MZ," shorthand for Mark Zuckerberg. Meta has argued that many of the communications identifying who specifically approved particular torrenting decisions are protected by privilege, which is part of why the chain of authorization has stayed murky this long.
Judge Hixon's order chips away at that shield. By requiring Meta to name the actual decision-makers, the ruling increases the odds that discovery eventually surfaces exactly who at the top approved using pirated libraries to train Meta's AI models, and how far up the chain that approval went.
For the plaintiffs, the strategic value is obvious: a case built around diffuse, informal staff behavior is a much weaker target than one built around specific executives making a calculated call to use stolen books at scale. For Meta, the ruling closes off a defense that let it treat the piracy as an operational accident rather than a corporate decision. Whether that chain of approval actually leads to Zuckerberg's desk remains to be seen, but the court has now made it Meta's job to show its work.
