📰 New article from TorrentFreak
Judge Allows BitTorrent Seeding Claims Against Meta, Despite Lawyers ‘Lame Excuses’
Judge Slams “Lame Excuses” but Lets Authors Add BitTorrent Seeding Claim Against Meta
A U.S. district judge has allowed authors—including Sarah Silverman and Richard Kadrey—to amend their lawsuit against Meta, adding a contributory copyright infringement claim over the company’s alleged use of pirated books to seed BitTorrent files—despite scathing criticism of the plaintiffs’ legal team.
The core issue? Meta used shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive to download (and seed) copyrighted books for training its Llama AI models. While a prior ruling dismissed the claim that this training violated copyright (calling it fair use), Meta remains vulnerable over how it obtained those files. Initially, plaintiffs argued Meta directly infringed by distributing full works via BitTorrent—a tough standard to meet, since torrents share files in chunks.
Fast forward: In December, the authors tried to add a new claim—that Meta helped others infringe by seeding. But Judge Vince Chhabria wasn’t buying their excuse: “newly crystallized” evidence about uploading activity. He called it a “lame excuse” and “doubletalk,” noting the claim should’ve been added months earlier.
Why approve it anyway?
Two pragmatic reasons:
- Class protection: If the class loses on the distribution claim, they might lose their shot at a contributory claim later.
- Consolidation: Meta’s own request to sync this case with a similar Entrepreneur Media lawsuit makes adding the claim low-effort for them.
Chhabria’s bottom line? Plaintiffs’ lawyers lucked out—not because they did their job well, but because Meta didn’t oppose on practical grounds.
The case now moves forward with a fourth amended complaint… and perhaps a new level of scrutiny for how AI companies handle piracy, even when training data comes from the dark web. 🌐⚖️