Meta tries to scapegoat staff who downloaded torrents to spare execs

Meta has spent weeks trying to pin its AI training copyright mess on rank-and-file staff who downloaded torrents. That story is getting harder to sell. A court order now pushes the company to name the executives who approved the decision to pirate books from shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive and LibGen, according to TorrentFreak.

The ruling affects a class action brought by book authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, along with a separate case from publisher Entrepreneur Media. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixon largely sided with the plaintiffs, saying Meta has to make the key decision-makers clear rather than leaving the chain of command blurry.

That matters because testimony from Meta employees already pointed upward. Staffers who downloaded torrents said supervisors and managers had greenlit the piracy, which is exactly the layer Meta seems most eager to keep out of view. The order could widen the list of names that end up in the record, including people involved in early AI training.

Meta’s own court filing tried to recast the whole operation as an “informal approach,” with no one in authority supposedly making decisions at all. In that telling, a “decision” existed only because some employees technically downloaded torrents. It’s a neat bit of corporate fog. Judges tend not to love fog.

The larger fight here isn’t really about torrents. It’s about who gets blamed when AI companies build giant training sets from material they don’t want to talk about too openly. Meta is betting on a very old Silicon Valley trick: if the paper trail gets uncomfortable, pretend the paper trail was never a real process.