Meta ordered to identify employees who authorized shadow-library downloads for AI training

What happened

Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson finalized a discovery order requiring Meta to identify every "natural person who made, authorized, or approved any decision to obtain or download any Shadow Library Dataset," per Digital Music News. The order stems from publisher Entrepreneur Media's action, part of five jointly managed complaints accusing Meta of training its AI models on protected writing.

What the order requires

• The names of employees who made, authorized, or approved decisions to obtain or download shadow-library datasets, including Anna's Archive and LibGen
• The circumstances surrounding those decisions and each person's approximate dates of involvement
• Identification of those who authorized obtaining datasets "by means of the BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer protocol," including decisions about whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding, when Meta obtained LibGen SciMag (reportedly about 80 million scholarly papers) and Anna's Archive content via BitTorrent
• Where decisions were made by a group or team, every participant is responsive to the interrogatory — Meta's argument that decisions were collaborative did not narrow the disclosure

Status and limits

This is a discovery order, not a ruling on the merits of the infringement claims. The litigation accuses Meta of unlawfully training AI models on protected writing; the order compels disclosure of who authorized the dataset acquisition.