Adult studio ties Meta exec's home torrents to $446M AI piracy suit

Strike 3 Holdings, an adult film producer known for filing thousands of anonymous “John Doe” BitTorrent lawsuits each year, is trying to fold one of those routine cases into its much larger $446 million copyright suit against Meta. That larger case accuses Meta of downloading roughly 2,973 of Strike 3’s films via BitTorrent to train AI models. In a new motion, Strike 3 says the subscriber behind a residential AT&T connection it sued in March is an executive in Meta’s Reality Labs division, the group that builds the Quest VR headsets, identified after AT&T complied with a subpoena.

Strike 3’s case rests largely on timing and volume rather than direct proof. It claims that hours after its general counsel emailed Meta’s lawyers forensic evidence of torrenting on corporate IP addresses in March 2025, infringement first appeared on the executive’s home connection — insinuating Meta shifted activity off-network to evade detection. It also logged nearly 20,000 files from that connection, including VR adult titles and material it characterizes as AI training data, arguing the roughly 150-plus daily downloads are implausible for one person with a demanding job. It wants the cases related so it can name Meta directly and compel Reality Labs torrenting records.

Meta pushes back on the well-worn point that an IP address does not identify who was actually downloading, a caveat the magistrate judge herself flagged when granting the subpoena. The company also notes the new theory contradicts Strike 3’s own complaint, which alleges corporate “off-infra” downloading began in 2018 and continued after the 2025 notice. Meta has previously explained similar cases — including another Reality Labs worker — as personal, unrelated use. Whether Judge Eumi K. Lee links the cases remains undecided, and for now the executive stays anonymous even to Meta.