An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These logs would presumably reveal how Meta's torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings. [...] The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta's machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity. Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors' contributory infringement claim. To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who "made, authorized, or approved" the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent. Meta's answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn't identify anyone who "formally" made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued. When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions. Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna's Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. In other words, the company didn't name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent. "On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024," Entrepreneur Media countered. An internal Meta logbook warned that using torrents would involve sharing copyrighted material with others. "Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay," the logbook stated. Although Meta admits downloading data from LibGen and Anna's Archive via BitTorrent, it claims no one "made, authorized, or approved" a decision to distribute the material and that measures were taken to limit seeding. Meta's own expert previously estimated that uploads from its AWS servers amounted to no more than roughly 30% of the data downloaded during a period in 2024. Judge Thomas Hixson is not convinced and ordered (PDF) the company to identify everyone involved in approving the downloads, including those who decided "whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself. [...] As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company's long-standing claim that it doesn't interfere with its DNS. In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn't blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts. "To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver," the company's latest report reads. [...] Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders. Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission (PDF) to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access. Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted "within seconds," Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking. "For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds," Cloudflare informed the Commission. For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.

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