📰 New article from TorrentFreak
Meta Confirms ‘Data Engineer’ is Behind Key IP Address in Adult Film Piracy Lawsuit
Meta is fighting a $446 million copyright lawsuit, and the twist? It’s apparently not a corporate conspiracy, but a family drama.
Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media accused the tech giant of downloading thousands of adult films via BitTorrent to train its AI models. Meta’s response? “Not us, but our employee’s son.” The company confirmed that the IP address in question belonged to a Comcast subscriber whose adult son worked as a Meta Data Engineer. Meta argues the torrenting was personal activity on a home network, unrelated to any official data collection efforts.
Here’s the kicker: Meta admits to using BitTorrent to download public text datasets for its LLaMA models, but insists those files were never adult content. To dodge liability, they’re making two bold legal moves. First, they claim any file fragments uploaded during the process were de minimis—too small to count as a usable copy. Second, they’re questioning Strike 3’s copyright validity, suggesting the films might infringe on other works.
With mediation looming in August and a trial set for 2028, this is shaping up to be a landmark case for AI training ethics. Watch this space, because how courts view “tiny fragments” of data could change everything.