US Judge Orders Meta to Identify Employees Behind Torrenting Pirated Books for AI

Key points

• Meta must name all employees involved in the decision to use torrents for downloading books.
• The judge previously ordered Meta to provide server command histories to investigate the torrenting process.
• The case is part of a copyright lawsuit involving publishers like Entrepreneur Media and authors such as Sarah Silverman.
• The court ruled that training AI on these books falls under 'fair use', leaving the torrenting claims as the main issue.
• Meta's expert estimated that up to 30% of the data downloaded was uploaded from its AWS servers.
• Internal logs revealed that an employee warned against torrenting due to legal concerns.