Kadrey v Meta Platforms Inc

Case Information

Case name	Kadrey v. Meta Platforms Inc
Court	U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California
Docket	3:23-cv-03417-VC
Filed	July 7, 2023
Judge(s)	Vince Chhabria; Thomas S. Hixson (discovery magistrate judge)
Plaintiffs	Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden and other named authors
Defendants	Meta Platforms, Inc.
Case type	Proposed civil class action
Claims / issues	Direct and contributory copyright infringement involving books and alleged torrent distribution
Status	October 29, 2026 minute entry directs class discovery, revokes Boies Schiller’s interim-class-counsel status and sets further case management for December 11; later orders have not been verified.

Kadrey v. Meta Platforms Inc is a proposed civil class action in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Claims and issues

Direct and contributory copyright infringement involving books and alleged torrent distribution.

Procedural history

June 2026: parties briefed certification of a partial summary-judgment order for interlocutory appeal. A ruling on that request has not been verified.

October 19, 2026 discovery order

Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson issued a ten-page order addressing discovery disputes in five related actions: Kadrey (23-cv-03417), Entrepreneur Media (25-cv-09579), Chicken Soup for the Soul (26-cv-02333), Cambronne (26-cv-03725) and Cognella (26-cv-04053). The order separates the requests and relief for each dispute.

For Kadrey, the court ordered Meta to submit specified redacted AI Data Catalog documents for in camera review within seven days, with claimed privileged portions highlighted. It denied the authors’ request for three additional hours of Rule 30(b)(6) deposition testimony. The court declined to resolve deposition scope objections apart from an effort to admit the testimony and found the identified preparation deficiencies insufficient to justify the requested additional examination. In camera submission is review by the court, not an order publicly releasing the documents.

Decisionmaker interrogatories in Entrepreneur Media

The order granted Entrepreneur Media’s motion concerning interrogatory 22, requiring identification of the natural persons who made, authorized or approved decisions to obtain or download shadow-library datasets containing its works. Where a decision was attributable to a group, the court required identification of everyone who participated in making that decision; the request was not limited to formal approvals. It also required approximate involvement dates and identification of the relevant decisions and datasets.

For interrogatory 23, the court granted the requests to identify participants in the discussion preceding a LibGen torrent download, approvals to proceed by torrent and the April 2024 Anna’s Archive download, and decisions whether or how to seed or mitigate seeding. It denied a separate request to state whether Meta searched particular former employees’ custodial materials and contacted their supervisors, because the interrogatory did not ask for that information. These interrogatories were Entrepreneur Media’s requests, rather than an identical award of relief to every plaintiff in all five cases.

The October 6 joint letter records the parties’ opposing positions: Entrepreneur Media argued that Meta’s responses failed to identify approvers, while Meta maintained it had supplied the available information and that some decisions reflected team consensus. The letter is advocacy; the October 19 order supplies the court’s resulting discovery directions.

Other relief and limits

The order granted Fox’s protective-order request across the related actions. It directed destruction of inadvertently produced unredacted licensing and negotiation materials and relieved Fox and Meta of further unredacted production, while leaving the previously produced redacted versions available. The court weighed competitive harm and proportionality; it did not decide that all licensing evidence was irrelevant.

In the Three Cs’ dispute filed in Chicken Soup, the court granted or partly granted supplementation concerning removal of copyright-management information, downloaded works not used for training and acquisition of specified deleted data, while denying several other requests. It required seven-day status reports on Entrepreneur Media’s interrogatories 12 and 19. These discovery rulings do not determine copyright liability, willfulness, the amount of any seeding or the ultimate fair-use merits.

October 29, 2026 case-management conference

At the October 29 case-management conference, Judge Vince Chhabria directed the Kadrey parties to begin class discovery. He revoked Boies Schiller’s status as interim class counsel and said the court would revisit that appointment. The minute entry also denied the Sullivan plaintiffs’ motion for interim lead counsel without prejudice. These are case-management directions, rather than class certification or a merits judgment.

The entry permits Entrepreneur Media and the Three Cs—Chicken Soup, Cambronne/Carreyrou and Cognella—to file amended complaints by November 6, with initial copies sent to Meta by November 3. It sets a December 4 case-management statement and a December 11 conference at 1:30 p.m. by videoconference. The later October 30 order and actual delivery or filing of amendments have not been verified.

See also

• Copyright cases
• Case tracker
• November 2, 2026 news coverage of the Meta proceedings
• October 19 discovery order — October 20, 2026 news coverage
• April 6, 2026 — Fourth Amended Complaint Allowed
• Carreyrou v Anthropic PBC
• Businessing LLC v Runway AI Inc
• Beaulier v NVIDIA et al

References