Magistrate judge in the Meta AI training cases orders destruction of an unredacted Fox license and compels answers on who approved shadow library downloads

What the court decided

The document is a 10-page Discovery Order signed by United States Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson and dated October 19, 2026, filed as Document 874 in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-03417-VC (TSH). The same order is captioned in four related cases against Meta Platforms, Inc. in the Northern District of California: Entrepreneur Media, LLC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 25-cv-09579; Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC v. Meta Platforms Inc., No. 26-cv-02333; Cambronne Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 26-cv-03725; and Cognella, Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 26-cv-04053. It resolves several discovery disputes. (Order pp. 1 to 2.)

The Fox license documents

The order says non-party Fox Corp. has a license agreement with Meta under which Fox provides certain multimedia content for use in AI training models, that the license does not pertain to books or similar content, and that Fox, the plaintiffs, and Meta had agreed to production of redacted versions protecting the fee and other competitively sensitive terms. It says Meta inadvertently produced an unredacted version of the license agreement and unredacted negotiation communications and drafts. (Order pp. 4 to 5.)

The court said relevance was not the most important issue. Weighing the risk of a further inadvertent disclosure against the importance of the unredacted information, it found the price term and other competitively sensitive terms of an agreement with a different copyright holder concerning a different media format too distant from the facts of these cases to be important, citing the proportionality factor in Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1) and the undue burden standard in Rule 26(c)(1). It granted Fox's motion, ordered the plaintiffs to destroy the inadvertently produced documents, and relieved Fox and Meta of any obligation to produce the unredacted license agreement or unredacted negotiation documents. Fox does not object to the plaintiffs keeping and using the redacted versions. (Order pp. 5 to 6.)

Who approved the shadow library downloads

Entrepreneur Media's Interrogatory 22 asks Meta to identify each natural person who made, authorized, or approved any decision to obtain or download any shadow library dataset containing its works. The court found Meta's response wandered away from the question by discussing formal decisions and use of the data rather than obtaining or downloading it. It said the interrogatory does not presume a single decisionmaker, and that if a decision is fairly attributable to a group or team, everyone who participated is responsive. The motion to compel on Interrogatory 22 was granted, including dates of involvement for each person and the persons who approved the LibGen acquisition within FAIR and the resumption of the Anna's Archive download, or a statement under oath that Meta has identified none. (Order pp. 6 to 7.)

Interrogatory 23 asks the same question for obtaining, downloading, uploading, or distributing shadow library datasets by BitTorrent or another peer-to-peer protocol. The court granted the motion in part, ordering Meta to identify the people involved in the discussion before one named individual's torrenting and the approval to proceed by torrent, each person who directed or approved another named individual's April 2024 download, and each person who made, authorized, or approved decisions on whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding, when Meta obtained LibGen Scimag and Anna's Archive content by BitTorrent. It denied a request about custodial searches because the interrogatory did not ask for that. (Order p. 7.)

Other rulings

In Kadrey, the court ordered Meta to submit redacted documents from its AI Data Catalog for in camera review within seven days, and denied the plaintiffs' motion for three more hours of Rule 30(b)(6) deposition time. It declined to rule on scope objections made during the deposition, citing Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 30(c)(2) and 32(b) and (d)(3), and found too paltry a showing that the witness was unprepared on topics about Library Genesis, Anna's Archive, Z-Library, Internet Archive, and Duxiu. It struck ECF No. 853-1 at Meta's request and denied the related motion to seal as moot. (Order pp. 2 to 4.)

On a motion to compel that the order says was brought by the plaintiffs it calls the Three Cs but filed only in No. 26-cv-02333, the court ordered Meta to answer Interrogatory 6 in terms of the removal of copyright management information, a term defined in 17 U.S.C. 1202(c), rather than "repetitive text," noting that Rule 33(a)(2) allows interrogatories on the application of law to fact. It ordered Meta to say what, if anything, it did with the plaintiffs' works that were downloaded but not used for model training, and to explain how about nine terabits of shadow library data deleted on or about July 13, 2023 was acquired, one of two defects the plaintiffs alleged in Meta's answer to Interrogatory 15. It denied the motion on Interrogatories 2, 3, and 4, and on Interrogatories 5 and 13 held that answering for every internal iteration of a model, beyond the publicly released Llamas 1 to 4, is not proportional to the needs of the case. It ordered status reports within seven days on Entrepreneur Media's Interrogatories 12 and 19. (Order pp. 8 to 10.)