On October 19, 2026, five copyright complaints against Meta Platforms were filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California: Levine v. Meta (3:26-cv-12137), Reno v. Meta (3:26-cv-12131), Sheard v. Meta (3:26-cv-12126), Older v. Meta (3:26-cv-12115) and Winspear v. Meta (3:26-cv-12100). All five are brought by the same counsel, Stris & Maher with Freedman Normand Friedland. The two complaints reviewed in full for this entry each list about 60 named authors and small publishers, so the five suits together cover a few hundred plaintiffs.
The complaints allege that Meta built its Llama and Muse model families on pirated books. They say Meta downloaded works from shadow libraries including LibGen, Z-Library and Anna’s Archive, often by torrenting, and that the torrent protocols made Meta a re-distributor of the files. They also allege a separate book-scanning operation the complaint calls “Project Vellum”, through which Meta acquired physical books en masse, scanned and OCR’d them and fed the text into training of its Muse models, including Muse Spark (April 2026) and Muse Glimmer (August 2026). The four counts are direct infringement for the pirated copies, direct infringement for Project Vellum, contributory infringement through torrenting, and removal of copyright management information.
The filings are deliberately not class actions. The Levine complaint says the plaintiffs “elect not to bring this case as a class action” because the Copyright Act entitles them to individualized statutory damages determined by a jury, and it criticizes “sprawling class-action settlements structured to resolve claims for pennies on the dollar.” It draws on the record in Kadrey v. Meta, including that Meta first downloaded LibGen in 2022.
Why it matters: these suits test a different model for AI training claims than the class actions that have dominated so far: many individual plaintiffs per complaint, each seeking per-work statutory damages, which multiplies exposure and keeps each author out of any future class deal. The Project Vellum allegation also goes after the practice of buying and scanning books, arguing it is infringement in its own right and separate from the piracy claims.
What it does not show: these are complaints, and the allegations about torrenting and Project Vellum have not been tested or proven. No court has ruled on them. This entry read two of the five complaints in full and confirmed that the other three share the filing date and counsel.