Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive

2 days ago (torrentfreak.com)

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..

  • > 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 wonder how much porn you have to personally download to be considered prolific.

    EDIT: "Reality Labs executive downloaded nearly 20,000 files at his home for work purposes"

    Yeah, you can't consume that much porn for your own amusement.

    • I've seen anti terrorist police appear at offices because certain executives were trading so much porn they assumed there must be messages hidden in it.

      The noise has always been about the UN private network which is apparently absolutely full of anything you might ever want.

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    • like literally too, 20k films at let's say 30m average is 400+ continuous, unbroken days worth of content

      and I assume this was just for content from Reality Labs. god knows how much other torrenting was done outside of Reality Labs IP

      14 replies →

    • I download clips but I mostly don't really watch most of what I download; I do when the internet is down.

  • 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

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    • 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.

  • > 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.

      6 replies →

    • They are, they probably just did slightly better at regurgitating leetcode problems than you

    • 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.

      2 replies →

    • Just tell yourself that they rejected you because they thought you had too strong a moral compass and you wouldn't click with the company's overall lack of ethics

    • Who'd have thought a Meta exec would be arrogant enough to assume they can get away with this (!!). /s

  • 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.

    • Why was torrenting needed anyway? Meta could’ve easily reached out to adult media providers to work on VR headset compatibility under an NDA. Or hired a third party contractor to do it.

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  • > 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.

  • The second read, (b), is irrelevant with respect to Meta's liability for the downloads before the switch to a residential IP, i.e., the downloads that prompted the email to Meta's lawyers

  • > "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.

> 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.

  • but they allege $446M in damage. not all 20,000 files were porn, but they also don’t say where that number comes from

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.

  • I don't believe, but this feels a bit like:

    "Hey... we need to improve our porn detection AI... but we want to avoid paying for all that porn... is anyone open to taking on some personal liability for a nice bonus this year"

    I'm just saying... maybe...

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.

Seems likely (to me) that he was probably using his company laptop and it was connected to the corp VPN most of the time.

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?

  • Rulings have said that reproduction of AI models which were trained on copyrighted material are not violating the copyright on those materials. The initial copying of those materials without paying is illegal regardless. You still have to buy or otherwise legally view a copy of the book/movie/photo to train your model on it.

    • Not quite.

      If the materials were publicly available on a site and scraped? Fair use.

      If they were distributed illegally and acquired through that distribution? Cooked.

      If you scraped it AND saved it? Cooked.

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  • 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?

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  • They might be in the clear if they were solely downloading (might) but if he's also seeding then it's just copyright violations.

Jackie Treehorn knows which Lebowski you are, Lebowski. Jackie Treehorn wants to see the deadbeat Lebowski.

Remember that tech used to be great people making things? And just look how good we progressed, speculating about porn use...

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.

    • What cases are you talking about? My general understanding is that if the VPN provider does not keep any logs, all that is left is timing / bandwidth correlation. If the endpoint you are connecting to isn't compromised and you connect to a high traffic node wouldn't this be essentially impossible? Unless you do some user error stuff like logging into accounts tied to your public persona?

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    • Depends on the VPN. Mullvad account don’t have a username tied to you.

  • 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.

    • Company I work for got sued because someone filled out a form to get contacted, got a phone call as is expected after filling out said form, then sued because they're on the do not call list. Why did you fill out the form then?

  • How do you know the IP in question was not the final hop of someone's VPN connection?

    • 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 for piracy purposes unless it's a commercial, no-log VPN. Since when a VPN is used to move the point at which traffic enters the internet, the owner of the VPN exit will be held to account.

      They can try to claim they were running a "private" VPN and gave random people (from reddit and discord) internet access through it. They can try to claim they don't keep logs. Meanwhile, for a facebook VP with suspected activity tied to facebook corporate, the rightsholder will subpoena every digital device in the person's home, depose all their family and close friends, subpoena their facebook email...

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    • 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.

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Or his kid, spouse, or other household member...

  • Hours after they alerted Meta that similar activity was happening from their corporate network?

  • I'd bet that executive's VR headset is tied to a facebook account and there are logs of everything that was watched and when along with data collected from the device and the environment it was in. The discovery from this lawsuit could be very telling.

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.

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

Not a week goes by without Meta reconfirming it's the company of choice for scumbags.

> arguing that a Reality Labs executive downloaded nearly 20,000 files at his home for work purposes, not for personal use

So is it a Reality Labs executive or a Meta executive? Is the headline lying?

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