Meta Says the 2,400 'Adult Movies' They Torrented Were for Personal Use

>Meta, naturally, argues that no! No! That porn was, uh…it was for personal use! Yeah, it was for…me, and not for large-scale copyright infringement!

>[...]

>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.

> argues the supposed downloads, which are roughly 22 per year

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!

This is funny, but from the article it also seems like a pretty frivolous law suit that is more of a shakedown racket than protecting the actual business.

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 Guardian article about the copyright trolls, Strike 3, has some interesting tidbits about copyright infringement lawsuits:

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).

You gotta hand it to Meta, that's one creative defense. "Sorry your honor, our entire engineering team are certified gooners. We have documentation."

Previous:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45751202

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937565

Use the dirty-net next time the non-meta ASN for doing pentesting. Every company should route non-essential traffic out alternate circuits to keep their employee IP addresses and behavior out of logs that point back to their employer. This does not preclude scrubbing the traffic with ones DLP, MitM proxies, etc... Its just another route. Keep YT and porn off the corporate circuits. Maybe even go so far as to have multiple SNAT pools for different categories of non-work related content. Make the dirty-net the default routes and only route meta-destine networks over the corporate specific networks.

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...

Using torrent is actually an argument in favour of AI usage - people, I think, usually just watch movies on the web? Also, with torrents you would have to wait, while, as a proverb says, "a spoon is needed before the dinner". Or these are the premium type of movies that can be found for free only at torrent sites and are downloaded for later viewing?

I actually wouldn't be surprised if it turned out employees downloaded porn on company computers 2400 times at company the size of Meta.

From the linked Ars article:

> 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.

"Only in the world of AI algorithm training can you claim that you were torrenting 2,400 porn videos for personal use and have that seem like the lesser of two evils."

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)