Meta tries to scapegoat staff who downloaded torrents to spare execs

Going further, Meta accused Entrepreneur Media of “speculation,” claiming there is “no basis” for suspecting that “someone at Meta must have ‘approved’ a ‘decision’ to perform a seeding activity that specific mitigations were deployed to avoid.”

Instead of naming staff and providing specifics like their “role, approximate dates of involvement,” and “whether the person made or contributed to the decision and/or authorized, ratified, directed, permitted, or approved it,” Meta suggested that it only provide names. (Hixon disagreed that would be appropriate.)

To avoid naming executives, Meta explained that it wasn’t common practice for leadership to make “formal” decisions when acquiring datasets for early AI training on models like Llama 1 and 2. Only later on, Meta claimed, did that “initial informal approach” give “way to more structured review and approval processes.”

Not buying Meta’s arguments, Hixon said that authors did not limit their request to formal decisions, while agreeing that Meta must do more to answer questions about who “made, authorized, or approved any decision to obtain or download the shadow libraries.”

Another tactic Meta used was to claim that torrenting approvals came from “collaborative” talks, so there isn’t “a single decision-maker.” Again, Hixon suggested Meta was reading the authors’ request too narrowly. Their motion did “not presume that Meta had a single decision maker; it asks about all the decision makers,” Hixon said.

Finally, Meta must also answer questions about what happened to pirated works that were not used for AI training, Hixon said.

Meta and Entrepreneur Media’s lawyer did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.