It's an entertaining headline, but it actually seems legit rather than a creative legal defense.
What happened to Vice?
Is it a private equity content mill now? (a la newsweek, ex-gawker properties)
(I'm asking because moralizing about torrenting porn is not a very 2010s vice thing, and I lost track of it)
From the article: this amounts to only about 20 videos per year and the evidence is based on home IP addresses of employees. Such as: “The father of a Meta contractor whose home IP address allegedly downloaded 97 videos. Strike 3 suggests this links Meta to more infringement. Meta counters that it only proves someone’s dad is super into porn and has no VPN”.
Pretty weak evidence of any malfeasance on Meta’s part.
The linked article mentions there was torrenting activity from Meta's ip blocks as well:
>This prompted Strike 3 and Counterlife Media to search for Meta-linked IP addresses in their archive of collected BitTorrent data. This scan revealed that forty-seven IP addresses, identified as owned by Facebook, allegedly infringed their copyrighted works.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-lawsuit-accuses-meta-of-p...
It is always those perverts grandmas and grandpas. /s
>[...]
>Meta’s motion to dismiss the case calls Strike 3’s torrent-tracking “guesswork and innuendo” and argues the supposed downloads, which are roughly 22 per year, are too few to have any use in training AI. If anything, the company says, that pattern looks less like corporate malfeasance and more like “private personal use.”
The article seems skeptical of Meta, but their defense seems... fairly reasonable? They have hundreds of thousands of employees, so the prospect of all of them combined accidentally torrenting 22 porn movies per year without a VPN doesn't seem too implausible.
That torrents and/or porn are not hard blocked is surprising. For the low volume, I suppose anything can get through.
I've certainly downloaded Ubuntu over torrent on that wifi.
> Notably, the flagged downloads spanned seven years, starting in 2018. That’s about four years before Meta’s AI efforts “researching Multimodal Models and Generative Video” began
> Instead, Meta argued, available evidence “is plainly indicative” that the flagged adult content was torrented for “private personal use”—since the small amount linked to Meta IP addresses and employees represented only “a few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time.”
Personal use sounds plausible to me when imagining something like 70k employees and a bit of a "bro" culture.
the math doesn't add up since that implies it took 100+ years to accumulate 2400 violations, but just looking at 2400 torrents, how many employees does Meta have? With at least several thousand guys, if some have poor 'keeping work and home separate' hygiene, and especially with work-from-home, they probably just forgot to disconnect from VPN after work. Seems more likely than a very sloppy AI training scheme. If they wanted to so such a scheme, it's so easy to do using a public VPN.
EDIT: If I'm reading right, they're actually just basing their suit on HOME IP addresses. So we're being asked to believe the plan was:
1. Top secret porn AI plan is hatched
2. Management considers how to accomplish this and decided the best course of action is to tell dozens of engineers to go home and download a handful of porn torrents each and bring them into work to train it.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Over 50,000 employees, per various sources.
isn't this a reason for termination ?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2025/nov/...
> In 2014, the couple had filed a third of all US copyright litigation that year: 1,300 infringement cases.
> According to Westlaw and Pacer data from the past three years, Strike 3 accounted for 50% of the federal copyright docket all on its own.
That implies there are few copyright infringement lawsuits for a country of 340 million people. Do I misunderstand? Does the denominator all copyright infringement enforcement processes? Maybe there are mechanisms besides federal courts, and of course it omits lawsuits threatened but never filed (though Strike 3 files them and then subpeonas IP addresses).
Bender•2mo ago
I set up something like this ages ago in a company that was acquired by a company run by a literal mobster. I had a 1U server with two interfaces that routed my coworkers out a path that bypassed the mob monitored devices. To the uppers it just appeared my coworkers were really dedicated and not wasting time on Youtube, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc...