However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.
“Just hours later, Strike 3 first recorded BitTorrent infringement on John Doe’s residential IP Address,” the motion reads.
“This may suggest that Meta desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address in order to prevent further detection,”
Seems like there are 2 different reads to that. (a) is like they say, and Meta was using porn for AI training or something else official. Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN and was told to stop by their corp It folks..
I've lived in and around Cambridge for a very long time now. I've met a lot of Cambridge undergrads and graduates. Let me tell you: they are a mixed bag.
Don't misunderstand me: there are some very smart people at Cambridge University. Very smart indeed. And I think if you took any cohort from Cambridge Uni versus a similar cohort from another university you'd certainly find that, against most universities, the Cambridge cohort would be smarter on average. In fact the place is genuinely awash with very smart people literally everywhere.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people that went to Cambridge who clearly found a way to blag their way through the interview process that may not have been particularly closely correlated with their intellect. The same will be true of Meta, Google, etc. I swear, the interview processes at these companies are probably more of a sop to the egos of company leadership and people who already work there than they are any more effective at filtering down to good talent than less byzantine and overwrought hiring processes.
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
There's then a much more serious alignment pass.
Relationships can and do pre-vouch for big pieces of this such as alignment - if you've worked with someone for a decade, you are probably mission aligned.
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
When I worked for office with about 40 employees in 2001 or so, the FBI came to our office to arrest a guy using I think Limewire over our high speed internet access to share music and videos. It may be so common these days they only crack down like that on really egregious abuse.
Around that same time my own brother was working at the second largest record label in the world and their own servers were hacked and serving about 1/3 of global warez downloads.
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
I mean basically that. If you hit a corporate IP, unless they have flow level logging or you have very extensive timestamps, then the game ends, company says they've enacted new training or controls, but they can't identify a specific person and it's not their fault.
Essentially - this is not a suggestion.
Residential ip's map to a specific person, and it's a lot harder for them to deflect and say I'm not responsible for my own Internet connection
The raid being due solely to music copyright infringement is really the most likely situation. There's no need to imply it was anything else.
For example, in 2009 I worked at a record store that got raided due to such claims. The RIAA's informant claimed he had seen people selling hidden bootlegs, which absolutely wasn't happening, and that was all they needed to have cops raid the store, arrest several people and cart off boxes of not-bootlegged, sold-by-major-CD-distributors CDs. Court dates followed and the case was eventually dismissed (or settled due to being more convenient than continuing the case? I can't remember), but it still took time, money, and lawyers. And this was in 2009, when the recording industry wield less power than in 2001.
(I was running late for work that day or else I would have ended up arrested too, since I was one of the managers scheduled then. Thank god I was running late!)
This is crazy. Worked at a national ISP/telecom and one of the directors openly had a seedbox and was torrenting massive amount of things. Chalked it up as the poors being held to different standards as this person had a close relationship with one of the executives.
From TFA: "Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films"
> The company logged all BitTorrent activity detected from the executive’s connection, which was nearly 20,000 files.
> This includes VR adult titles made for Meta’s Quest headset. Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films.
> As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.
Seems plausible. The material contains many hours of highly detailed human interaction plus I don’t expect Meta would have moral objections given their track record.
I'm not a lawyer, but in my view copyright violations center around distribution, not necessarily the method by which a work is obtained
e.g. if someone is reciting a poem they wrote in a public park, and I make a recording of that recitation, I have not violated their copyright in doing so, however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
> "In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job," Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.
I hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
Strike 3, the studio involved, files more lawsuits in the USA than anyone else. I think that makes them the biggest Copyright Trolls of all time. They run their own BitTorrent monitoring operation.
> As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.
It sounds like this person/IP was just downloading a ton of different content, of which these VR videos were are part of.
Doesn't that water down their complaint a bit? If they are trying to say they moved to a residential IP to specifically download VR content for training data, why are they also downloading unrelated eBook and other media? Seems like VR content made up a pretty small percentage of overall downloaded content.
I'm torn on this. While I can imagine Meta being morally corrupt enough to do all of this, I just can't imagine an exec taking on personal liability for the company.
1 - How are people torrenting and not using a VPN? 2 - How are judges still allowing this business model of sharing files then trying to shake down people that download them?
Are you confusing Tor with a VPN? With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider, and there's usually just one hop (you run an encrypted connection between yourself and the VPN provider that all your traffic is routed over, then the VPN provider makes outgoing connections on your behalf). You're relying on the VPN provider's promise to not log customer connections, but if they are honest, all connections seem like they're coming from the VPN provider and aren't traceable beyond that.
With Tor, you connect to a random Tor node (which may be another residential computer), which connects to a node in the middle, which connects to an exit node, which forwards your requests on to their final destination. All connections look like they come from the exit node, which might be someone's residential IP.
Sure, that's plausible... a facebook exec so dumb that they're using their personal ISP connection to run a VPN for others, and even dumber that they don't notice or don't care about a massive amount of torrent traffic through that VPN.
It's not really a VPN if it's not a commercial, no-log VPN. Because it's not really private.
yeah everyone knows the losses they argue for are bullshit, I really think people should see how many times lawyers and other legal professionals give each other jobs by creating a world in which they are more and more needed.
Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
Very dumb but what if he claims he was only using to train an AI model, what was that ruling on copyright material being ok to training AI models on. Would this hold up in court or not?
I don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves.
The only exception would be a very small startup, which isn't the case here, or all IT, admin and engineering staff told the company they aren't doing anything illegal for Zuckerberg. That's not going to happen at Meta either.
Well now I'm hoping this makes it to a courtroom, so that the plaintiffs can ask, on the court record and under penalty of perjury, exactly what he was using that quantity of pornography for. How often, when, and so on. It would be a nice sociological study of what an executive does all day.
The idea that you'd get notified of infringing activity on corporate network and deliberately shift to residential without changing the activity is crazy. Like, it's hard to believe anyone is that dumb.
> Meta also flags a contradiction in Strike 3’s theory that downloads were switched to the home connection hours after the March 2025 warning. Strike 3’s own complaint alleges that Meta’s “off-infra” activity started in 2018, and that downloads on corporate IP addresses continued long after the notice.
Oh. The connection is maybe more tenuous than Strike 3 claims.
Even better, they used a corporate network. The plaintiff is alleging that this was actually for work, since they were an executive at Reality Labs (home of Oculus.) They contend that the executive was testing VR porn as part of their job.
This reminds me of a stand up comedy routine about people being bad at hiding their porn collections because their brain doesn't work right when they are horny.
However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.
“Just hours later, Strike 3 first recorded BitTorrent infringement on John Doe’s residential IP Address,” the motion reads.
“This may suggest that Meta desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address in order to prevent further detection,”
Seems like there are 2 different reads to that. (a) is like they say, and Meta was using porn for AI training or something else official. Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN and was told to stop by their corp It folks..
> Or (b) that he was personally downloading porn either at the office or a corp VPN
Man, if Facebook is hiring people this dumb, it's going to make me feel a lot worse about getting rejected after interviewing there.
Mate, I got rejected by Cambridge University.
I've lived in and around Cambridge for a very long time now. I've met a lot of Cambridge undergrads and graduates. Let me tell you: they are a mixed bag.
Don't misunderstand me: there are some very smart people at Cambridge University. Very smart indeed. And I think if you took any cohort from Cambridge Uni versus a similar cohort from another university you'd certainly find that, against most universities, the Cambridge cohort would be smarter on average. In fact the place is genuinely awash with very smart people literally everywhere.
But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people that went to Cambridge who clearly found a way to blag their way through the interview process that may not have been particularly closely correlated with their intellect. The same will be true of Meta, Google, etc. I swear, the interview processes at these companies are probably more of a sop to the egos of company leadership and people who already work there than they are any more effective at filtering down to good talent than less byzantine and overwrought hiring processes.
You just have to make your peace with it.
Cambridge alum here. Agree; admissions is a crapshoot. Job interviews are a crapshoot. C'est la vie.
This person is supposedly an executive. I doubt most executive could pass an FAANG technical interview.
is "executive" a well defined term for american corporate law? like "a person who can allocate funds from the master bank account without approval" or something like that?
"Officer" is typically anyone who can bind the company contractually.
Not really, It's just another term for upper management. It's just shorthand for any employee whose title begins with "Chief" or has "Executive" in it (among others like Chairman, President, etc).
Usually, people who can make large decisions for the business without approval from higher-level employees.
I doubt executives even go through the typical employee interview hazing. It's more vibes and "do you know the right people or go to the right prestigious school?"
Executive (and upper management) hiring is much more about owning and using risk, getting the management unit (your part of the org) all aligned and singing the same tune, and for executives showing that you've done this successfully across distinct business units (eg sales and engineering).
There's then a much more serious alignment pass.
Relationships can and do pre-vouch for big pieces of this such as alignment - if you've worked with someone for a decade, you are probably mission aligned.
It’s a massive company, with more than 75k employees. At that scale you have to have a lot of dumb people
The employees at any particular company are a random sample of the population, and will therefore have traits that occur in the larger population.
To be fair, you'd have to be pretty dumb to apply to work at Meta anyway.
They are, they probably just did slightly better at regurgitating leetcode problems than you
Did you apply for the VR porn training team?
I wouldn’t, lack of moral fiber is a key factor they look for
How is their network security that lax? I feel like if I tried run a torrent at work, netops would be hunting my ass down immediately.
Does anyone honestly believe that Zuck doesn't have his own history with filesharing? Any computer nerd from that time would have deep knowledge of filesharing.
Who'd have thought a Meta exec would be arrogant enough to assume they can get away with this (!!). /s
When I worked for office with about 40 employees in 2001 or so, the FBI came to our office to arrest a guy using I think Limewire over our high speed internet access to share music and videos. It may be so common these days they only crack down like that on really egregious abuse.
Around that same time my own brother was working at the second largest record label in the world and their own servers were hacked and serving about 1/3 of global warez downloads.
Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.
Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)
I mean basically that. If you hit a corporate IP, unless they have flow level logging or you have very extensive timestamps, then the game ends, company says they've enacted new training or controls, but they can't identify a specific person and it's not their fault.
Essentially - this is not a suggestion.
Residential ip's map to a specific person, and it's a lot harder for them to deflect and say I'm not responsible for my own Internet connection
It had to be more complicated than simple copyright infringement for the cops to get involved.
The music industry had more political power in 2001 than it does now.
Or he was sharing other material that was kept quiet.
The raid being due solely to music copyright infringement is really the most likely situation. There's no need to imply it was anything else.
For example, in 2009 I worked at a record store that got raided due to such claims. The RIAA's informant claimed he had seen people selling hidden bootlegs, which absolutely wasn't happening, and that was all they needed to have cops raid the store, arrest several people and cart off boxes of not-bootlegged, sold-by-major-CD-distributors CDs. Court dates followed and the case was eventually dismissed (or settled due to being more convenient than continuing the case? I can't remember), but it still took time, money, and lawyers. And this was in 2009, when the recording industry wield less power than in 2001.
(I was running late for work that day or else I would have ended up arrested too, since I was one of the managers scheduled then. Thank god I was running late!)
This is crazy. Worked at a national ISP/telecom and one of the directors openly had a seedbox and was torrenting massive amount of things. Chalked it up as the poors being held to different standards as this person had a close relationship with one of the executives.
From TFA: "Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films"
> The company logged all BitTorrent activity detected from the executive’s connection, which was nearly 20,000 files.
> This includes VR adult titles made for Meta’s Quest headset. Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films.
> As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.
> Meta was using porn for AI training or …
Seems plausible. The material contains many hours of highly detailed human interaction plus I don’t expect Meta would have moral objections given their track record.
What is the moral difference between training on porn vs other genres of media?
I suspect their goal is to train a model for detecting adult material, so that they can block it, which isn't necessarily an amoral goal
But would still be a copyright violation
I'm not a lawyer, but in my view copyright violations center around distribution, not necessarily the method by which a work is obtained
e.g. if someone is reciting a poem they wrote in a public park, and I make a recording of that recitation, I have not violated their copyright in doing so, however I might violate their copyright by reconstructing that poem and then distributing it
> "In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job," Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.
I hope they drag Meta hard and get every penny for this.
IT is usually not the one doing the enforcement. They typically only do the monitoring and may report some activity above thresholds.
Legal is usually the one initiating then engaging with HR to do enforcement.
Strike 3, the studio involved, files more lawsuits in the USA than anyone else. I think that makes them the biggest Copyright Trolls of all time. They run their own BitTorrent monitoring operation.
Meta, the other company involved, engaged in industrial scale piracy in pursuit of training data[1].
Let me break out the world's tiniest violin for them.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
They downloaded pdfs (shock and horror) to create and publish the first open weights LLM
Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
> Your ethics shouldn't be dictated by US copyright law
If your ethics deem Meta ethical, they probably need recalibrating.
Actor and action conflation is incredibly common these days. If someone is bad and worth condemnation, all their actions must also be bad.
https://twitter.com/dril/status/831805955402776576
It's more likely that their motivation was bad.
Are you saying laws shouldn’t restrict any company that give out an open source next-token iterator?
I think that’s more hopium ethics.
The company that owns the copyright should be allowed to enforce it. I don't see how that can be called trolling.
> As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.
It sounds like this person/IP was just downloading a ton of different content, of which these VR videos were are part of.
Doesn't that water down their complaint a bit? If they are trying to say they moved to a residential IP to specifically download VR content for training data, why are they also downloading unrelated eBook and other media? Seems like VR content made up a pretty small percentage of overall downloaded content.
I'm torn on this. While I can imagine Meta being morally corrupt enough to do all of this, I just can't imagine an exec taking on personal liability for the company.
how long are these videos? 2,973 of them (and not even the 20,000 count)? even at 15 minute clips that is like... five years?! watching non-stop.
I am hard pressed to believe that this was for the exec.
what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander
I just wnat to know what bandwidth this exec has at his house. I want it.
I doubt many consumers of these videos are watching them straight through like a normal movie.
Don't know how they're keeping up with the plot like that.
It said it was AT&T, which probably implies AT&T Fiber. Gigabit fiber.
Hoarders gonna hoard
I've heard the same about pirated software, people who have downloaded thousands of programs. People are strange.
umm it’s called archiving, thank you very much.
A few decades back, someone I know had entire CD towers worth of burned CDs & DVDs of porn. Easily onto the thousand discs.
This was mostly a hoarding thing. Hoarders gonna hoard.
1 - How are people torrenting and not using a VPN? 2 - How are judges still allowing this business model of sharing files then trying to shake down people that download them?
> not using a VPN
because in some cases VPNs tie to you neatly to an action better than just home internet.
With a VPN, you have much less deniability, because its tied to a device often with a username and password.
In countries with lax enforcement VPN use is not really needed.
In the UK you get a stern letter from your ISP and that's it.
How do you know the IP in question was not the final hop of someone's VPN connection?
Are you confusing Tor with a VPN? With a VPN the IP is a commercial server run by the VPN provider, and there's usually just one hop (you run an encrypted connection between yourself and the VPN provider that all your traffic is routed over, then the VPN provider makes outgoing connections on your behalf). You're relying on the VPN provider's promise to not log customer connections, but if they are honest, all connections seem like they're coming from the VPN provider and aren't traceable beyond that.
With Tor, you connect to a random Tor node (which may be another residential computer), which connects to a node in the middle, which connects to an exit node, which forwards your requests on to their final destination. All connections look like they come from the exit node, which might be someone's residential IP.
Sure, that's plausible... a facebook exec so dumb that they're using their personal ISP connection to run a VPN for others, and even dumber that they don't notice or don't care about a massive amount of torrent traffic through that VPN.
It's not really a VPN if it's not a commercial, no-log VPN. Because it's not really private.
yeah everyone knows the losses they argue for are bullshit, I really think people should see how many times lawyers and other legal professionals give each other jobs by creating a world in which they are more and more needed.
Of course legal professionals are always needed but so much of what is done today is just a kind of rent seeking.
This looks a lot like using a doxxing threat to gain unfair advantage in a legal dispute. The Prenda Law tactic.
Very dumb but what if he claims he was only using to train an AI model, what was that ruling on copyright material being ok to training AI models on. Would this hold up in court or not?
Downloading it and making a copy on your disk are separate potentially infringing events from copying into memory and a model.
I don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves.
The only exception would be a very small startup, which isn't the case here, or all IT, admin and engineering staff told the company they aren't doing anything illegal for Zuckerberg. That's not going to happen at Meta either.
> I don't know a single company where an executive would be downloading training data themselves.
Maybe an ethically bankrupt company with a "move fast and break things" ethos looking for exactly the plausible deniability your comment hints at?
> the plausible deniability
Well now I'm hoping this makes it to a courtroom, so that the plaintiffs can ask, on the court record and under penalty of perjury, exactly what he was using that quantity of pornography for. How often, when, and so on. It would be a nice sociological study of what an executive does all day.
They might be in the clear if they were solely downloading (might) but if he's also seeding then it's just copyright violations.
Pretty sure you could unredact this based on the length of the name in this font. People who redact things don't really think very hard.
Between that and the tenure, yeah.
The idea that you'd get notified of infringing activity on corporate network and deliberately shift to residential without changing the activity is crazy. Like, it's hard to believe anyone is that dumb.
> Meta also flags a contradiction in Strike 3’s theory that downloads were switched to the home connection hours after the March 2025 warning. Strike 3’s own complaint alleges that Meta’s “off-infra” activity started in 2018, and that downloads on corporate IP addresses continued long after the notice.
Oh. The connection is maybe more tenuous than Strike 3 claims.
> Oh. The connection is maybe more tenuous than Strike 3 claims.
Yeah they seem to be following the time-honored legal strategy of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks
Or his kid, spouse, or other household member...
Hours after they alerted Meta that similar activity was happening from their corporate network?
Read to the end. It isn't really clear how much causality can be inferred from the hours after thing.
That's a very dedicated kid.
Backdoored dad's work computer, how diabolical. ;)
Well the porn titles leans it a little.
Hey if the dad is into tech, decent chance the angry teenage kid is into tech too.
And probably back doors, too. Gotta verify in the downloads though.
There was huge traffic from Meta's corporate networks.
I would think a Meta Executive who was into torrenting would know they likely had enough to lose to use something other than their home IP address.
One might think to call them “Careless People”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
Read the book, you will never trust facebook again. (if you did before)
It is so easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.
I'd put good money on him thinking the odds of him getting caught were negligible.
Even better, they used a corporate network. The plaintiff is alleging that this was actually for work, since they were an executive at Reality Labs (home of Oculus.) They contend that the executive was testing VR porn as part of their job.
This reminds me of a stand up comedy routine about people being bad at hiding their porn collections because their brain doesn't work right when they are horny.
What if Meta is using its facial recognition on porn clips for blackmail and extortion?
What if the moon is secretly made of cheese?
“I only broke the law to train AI your honor”