Nazemian v. NVIDIA Corporation

— 1 — — 2 — — 3 — 4 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 5 NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA — 6 — 7 ABDI NAZEMIAN, et al., Case No. 24-cv-01454-JST 8 Plaintiffs, ORDER DENYING PLAINTIFFS’ 9 v. MOTION FOR RELIEF FROM NONDISPOSITIVE PRETRIAL ORDER 10 NVIDIA CORPORATION, Re: ECF No. 174 Defendant. — 11 — — 12 — 13 Before the Court is Plaintiffs’ motion for relief from a non-dispositive pretrial order 14 concerning the scope of discovery. ECF No. 175. The Court will deny the motion. 15 I. BACKGROUND 16 This is a suit for copyright infringement brought by Plaintiffs Abdi Nazemian, Brian 17 Keene, Stewart O’Nan, and other proposed class members who are authors of books that were 18 pirated and part of a training dataset that Defendant NVIDIA Corporation [NVIDIA] used for its 19 series of large language models named NEMO Megatron-GPT. ECF No. 1 ¶¶ 1–4. 20 On August 6, 2025, the parties asked Judge Kim to decide whether Plaintiffs were entitled 21 to seek discovery into NVIDIA’s potential use of pirated datasets other than “The Pile,” which is a 22 copy of “Books3”—the database that Plaintiffs had knowledge of and made allegations about in 23 the complaint. ECF No. 152 at 2; ECF No. 1 ¶ 31. Plaintiffs argued that the proposed searches 24 terms on six databases containing pirated materials are highly relevant and posed no undue burden 25 to NVIDIA. ECF No. 152 at 3, 5–6. Plaintiffs also argued that NVIDIA limited their ability to 26 identify other pirated databases they used to train their LLMs by rejecting requests either to 27 identify what other datasets their LLMs are trained or to run search terms intended to identify 1 were trained on Books3, and discovery on other pirated databases is an improper attempt to seek 2 discovery on datasets beyond those alleged to contain putative class members’ works, exceeding 3 the permissible scope of discovery. Id. at 7. 4 Judge Kim denied Plaintiffs’ request, ruling that since the Plaintiffs are only alleging that 5 the LLMs were trained on the Books3 database, discovery was appropriately limited to that 6 database. ECF No. 168 at 3. Judge Kim found that Plaintiffs were not entitled to information 7 about the use of any dataset by NVIDIA, and their discovery request lacked sufficient bounds. Id 8 at 3–4. On September 4, 2025, Plaintiffs filed a timely motion for relief from Judge Kim’s order, 9 which NVIDIA opposed on September 19, 2025. ECF Nos. 174, 178. 10 II. JURISDICTION 11 The Court has jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1331 . 12 III. LEGAL STANDARD 13 “A non-dispositive order entered by a magistrate must be deferred to unless it is ‘clearly 14 erroneous or contrary to law.’” Grimes v. City & Cnty. of San Francisco, 951 F.2d 236, 241 (9th 15 Cir. 1991) (quoting Fed. R. Civ. P. 72(a); 28 U.S.C. § 636 (b)(1)(A)). “A decision is ‘contrary to 16 law’ if it applies an incorrect legal standard or fails to consider an element of the applicable 17 standard.” Ingram v. Pac. Gas & Elec. Co., No. 12-cv-02777-JST, 2013 WL 6174487 , at *2 18 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 25, 2013) (citation omitted). While the “‘clearly erroneous’ standard applies to 19 the magistrate judge's findings of fact,” the magistrate's “legal conclusions are [reviewed] de 20 novo.” Wolpin v. Philip Morris Inc., 189 F.R.D. 418, 422 (C.D. Cal. 1999). 21 Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1) provides that “[p]arties may obtain discovery 22 regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party's claim or defense and 23 proportional to the needs of the case, considering the importance of the issues at stake in the 24 action, the amount in controversy, the parties' relative access to relevant information, the parties' 25 resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or 26 expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit.” Relevancy, for purposes of 27 discovery, is broadly defined to encompass “any matter that bears on, or that reasonably could 1 Found. Health Plan, Inc., 2024 WL 3225904 , at *1 (N.D. Cal. June 28, 2024) (citing In re 2 Williams-Sonoma, Inc., 947 F.3d 535, 539 (9th Cir. 2020)). “Though a magistrate judge's 3 determination of relevance is a legal conclusion, district courts have tended not to disturb such 4 conclusions absent abuse of discretion.” AMEC Env’t & Infrastructure, Inc. v. Integral 5 Consulting, Inc., No. 12-CV-01735-SC, 2014 WL 6601960 , at *2 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 19, 2014). 6 IV. DISCUSSION 7 Plaintiffs seek relief from Judge Kim’s order declining to compel discovery to run searches 8 on the use of six pirated databases. They argue that the order committed (1) legal error by 9 restricting discovery of evidence only to information known to Plaintiffs at the pleading stage, and 10 (2) abuse of discretion by failing to address Plaintiffs’ relevance argument in the absence of any 11 burden to NVIDIA. ECF No. 174 at 5. Plaintiffs argue that limiting discovery only to databases 12 that they already knew NVIDIA was using ignores precedent in copyright infringement cases and 13 undermines the utility and stated purpose of discovery. Id. at 4 . NVIDIA opposed the motion by 14 arguing that there was no evidence that the order was clearly erroneous or contrary to the law. 15 ECF No. 178 at 2. 16 Judge Kim’s order limited the scope of the databases that the Plaintiffs could examine to 17 only the Books3 dataset that Plaintiffs specifically alleged as a source of the pirated training 18 material. ECF No. 168 at 3. The Court does not find that Judge Kim committed legal error or an 19 abuse of discretion here by refusing to grant discovery on the additional databases based on 20 theories of infringement that exceed the scope of the allegations in the complaint. Courts in this 21 district have routinely denied discovery regarding theories that exceed the scope of the operative 22 complaint. See Anderson v. Stability AI Ltd., 23-cv-00201-WHO, ECF No. 14 at 2 (N.D. Cal. Jun. 23 27, 2025); In re Mosaic LLM Litig, 2025 WL 2402677 , at *2–3 (N.D. Cal. Aug. 19, 2025). It was 24 well within the magistrate court’s discretion to limit discovery to the specific allegations of 25 infringement made in the complaint. Further, Plaintiffs incorrectly argue that Judge Kim’s order 26 improperly limits the proposed class of authors whose work may exist in the other pirated 27 databases, when the limitations on the proposed class stem from the Plaintiffs’ own operative 1 CONCLUSION 2 For the above reasons, the Court denies Plaintiffs’ motion for relief from non-dispositive 3 || pretrial order. 4 IT IS SO ORDERED. 5 Dated: September 25, 2025 — 6 — JON S. TIG 7 United States District Judge — 8 — — 9 — — 10 — — 11 — — 12 — — 13 — © — 15 — — 16 — = 17 Z 18 — 19 — — 20 — — 21 — — 22 — — 23 — — 24 — — 25 — — 26 — — 27 — — 28 —