11 comments

  • drewg123 43 minutes ago
    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..

    • stevenwoo 35 minutes ago
      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.
      • sandworm101 0 minutes ago
        It had to be more complicated than simple copyright infringement for the cops to get involved.
      • busterarm 13 minutes ago
        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. ;)

    • ryandvm 34 minutes ago
      > 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.

      • dozerly 29 minutes ago
        They are, they probably just did slightly better at regurgitating leetcode problems than you
      • drewg123 25 minutes ago
        This person is supposedly an executive. I doubt most executive could pass an FAANG technical interview.
      • mcmcmc 7 minutes ago
        [delayed]
    • mc32 38 minutes ago
      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.

  • novok 1 minute ago
    How do they know it's exec, or the exec's teenage child who is also probably fairly tech savvy and the exec is probably too busy to look at the child's activity with a fine toothed comb.
  • hackingonempty 20 minutes ago
    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.
    • fn-mote 8 minutes ago
      The company that owns the copyright should be allowed to enforce it. I don't see how that can be called trolling.
  • WaitWaitWha 24 minutes ago
    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.

    • hackingonempty 17 minutes ago
      I doubt many consumers of these videos are watching them straight through like a normal movie.
    • hiccuphippo 14 minutes ago
      Hoarders gonna hoard
      • wvbdmp 8 minutes ago
        umm it’s called archiving, thank you very much.
    • well_ackshually 11 minutes ago
      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.

  • kodoman 39 minutes ago
    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?
    • gorbachev 4 minutes ago
      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.

    • hackingonempty 14 minutes ago
      Downloading it and making a copy on your disk are separate potentially infringing events from copying into memory and a model.
    • horsawlarway 32 minutes ago
      They might be in the clear if they were solely downloading (might) but if he's also seeding then it's just copyright violations.
  • bravoetch 40 minutes ago
    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?
    • RealityVoid 24 minutes ago
      In countries with lax enforcement VPN use is not really needed.
    • ranger_danger 16 minutes ago
      How do you know the IP in question was not the final hop of someone's VPN connection?
    • kodoman 36 minutes ago
      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.

  • modeless 23 minutes ago
    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.
  • SV_BubbleTime 57 minutes ago
    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.
    • stevenwoo 42 minutes ago
      One might think to call them “Careless People”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
      • chad_strategic 39 minutes ago
        Read the book, you will never trust facebook again. (if you did before)
    • tyre 41 minutes ago
      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.
    • staticman2 39 minutes ago
      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.
    • cgannett 55 minutes ago
      It is so easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.
      • shadowgovt 43 minutes ago
        I'd put good money on him thinking the odds of him getting caught were negligible.
  • flerchin 46 minutes ago
    Or his kid, spouse, or other household member...
    • eli 44 minutes ago
      Hours after they alerted Meta that similar activity was happening from their corporate network?
      • shadowgovt 43 minutes ago
        That's a very dedicated kid.

        Backdoored dad's work computer, how diabolical. ;)

    • tyre 43 minutes ago
      There was huge traffic from Meta's corporate networks.
  • pier25 22 minutes ago
    “I only broke the law to train AI your honor”