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AI copyright news, graded by source

Court rulings, company filings and allegations in the copyright cases against AI companies and pirate libraries, over books, articles, music, images, video and code. Checked for new filings every three hours; items are posted after review, so some appear later. Get these by e-mail · Court filings, free to read

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Company filingOctober 13, 2026Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-03417-VC · N.D. Cal.

Meta's torrenting witness, now public: no BitTorrent policy until 2025, no record of who approved LibGen, and an engineer who directly downloaded about 7 million LibGen files in 2023

Meta filed 106 pages of excerpts of the Aug. 28, 2026 deposition of James Beldock, its Rule 30(b)(6) witness on torrenting, after the authors filed the full transcript under seal, saying none of it needs sealing. Beldock testified that Meta had no BitTorrent policy until 2025, when manager approval became required, and that none was needed in 2022. Roller in the U.S. and Guillaume Lample in Paris torrented LibGen around the same time; Meta does not know which individuals approved LibGen beyond a FAIR leadership decision, or how much data was uploaded (its expert will estimate that from AWS billing and EMR logs). A notebook he reviewed shows Nikolay Bashlykov directly downloaded about 7 million LibGen fiction and SciTech files in 2023 while torrenting SciMag; he said the engineers running torrent scripts did not understand the upload settings. Comparing the methods: "It still sucks. It just sucks less." There was no policy against duplicate downloads; dataset approvals went through a review with lawyers; Meta's catalog listed Anna's Archive as approved for Llama 4 as of January 2025. He defined piracy as redistribution for profit and called any distribution by Meta unintentional.

Dkt. 860-1, public deposition excerpts (PDF, 106 pp.) ↗Dkt. 860, Meta's unopposed motion to strike and replace Exhibit D ↗Dkt. 859, Meta's response saying no portion needs sealing ↗Dkt. 872, order granting the motion to strike (Oct. 15) ↗

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What the labels mean

Every item says what kind of source it rests on. A court ruling or order is the court's own statement. A company filing is what a defendant says about itself. A government filing is a statement by a government agency that is not a party to the case, such as a statement of interest; it is the government's position, not a ruling. An allegation is what a complaint or motion claims and has not been decided. Reported means press reporting we have not confirmed from the primary document. Summaries are our own; follow the links for the source.

This page is general information, not legal advice. An allegation is not a finding. Whether any of this matters for a particular work or claim is a question for a lawyer.