Meta Confirms ‘Data Engineer’ is Behind Key IP Address in Adult Film Piracy Lawsuit

Meta has responded to the amended multi-million copyright lawsuit filed by adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings. While flatly denying that it pirated adult films for AI training, Meta confirmed that a key IP address is traced to the home of one of its former data engineers. At the same time, Meta proposes a novel "de minimis" BitTorrent defense.

Last summer, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the tech company downloaded thousands of their films via BitTorrent to train AI models.

After Meta’s motion to dismiss was denied last month by U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee, Strike 3 filed an amended complaint expanding its claims to 2,973 films, up from the original 2,396.

With that many works at stake, potential statutory damages could reach a massive $446 million.

This week, Meta filed its answer to the amended complaint at the California federal court, denying all allegations while raising several affirmative defenses. At the same time, the company also gave further insight into the piracy allegations.

Meta’s Data Engineer

The original complaint identified a then-unnamed Facebook employee who allegedly used a residential Comcast IP address to download content, while also sharing files through Meta corporate IPs and what Strike 3 described as “stealth” IP addresses.

According to the amended complaint, that single address was linked to the infringement of 97 of Strike 3’s works.

Meta’s answer offers a straightforward explanation that has nothing to do with an organized data collection effort. The company admits that “the subscriber’s adult son was a Contingent Worker at Meta from October 2022 to October 2024.” It further confirms that the same person became “an employee at Meta with the title Data Engineer from April 2025 to May 2026.”

From Meta’s answer
 

This phrasing is careful. By referring to “the subscriber’s adult son,” Meta positions the alleged torrenting as personal activity on a family member’s home Internet connection, unrelated to Meta.

Strike 3 apparently identified this person through their LinkedIn profile, which Meta says “speaks for itself”. In any case, Meta flatly denies that any employee’s BitTorrent activity was connected to its AI research or data collection.

The amended complaint, however, alleges that the infringement from the subscriber’s account stopped when the son’s contract with Meta ended.

Denials and a Fair Use Fallback

The broader answer follows a standard pattern of denials, which is common at this stage of a lawsuit. Meta denies downloading or uploading any of Strike 3’s adult films.

The tech company does admit downloading “portions of certain publicly available text datasets through direct download and by torrenting for purposes of developing and training some of its LLaMA models,” but insists these did not include adult films.

The company also acknowledges that it tried to prevent distributing any of the text files it had downloaded via BitTorrent for developing and training its language models. This shows that Meta admits sharing other content via BitTorrent, while explicitly denying Strike 3’s torrenting allegations.

In its affirmative defenses, Meta explicitly reserves fair use without asserting it. The company denies sharing any adult content, so fair use is not relevant, but it keeps it as an option just in case.

In the related Kadrey v. Meta lawsuit, where Meta admitted torrenting books for AI-training, fair use is the central defense, and Meta wants to keep that option open here as well.

Seeding Was “De Minimis”

As America’s most prolific copyright litigant, Strike 3 has built tens of thousands of lawsuits on the premise that sharing files via BitTorrent is copyright infringement. In those cases against individual defendants, a typical defense is that an IP address doesn’t identify a person.

Meta takes a different route. The company’s ninth affirmative defense doesn’t deny that data was uploaded from its IP addresses. Instead, it argues that any uploads during the torrenting process were “de minimis and did not result in the creation of an identifiable or usable copy of any copyrighted work.”

De Minimis

In other words, the fragments exchanged during BitTorrent transfers don’t amount to a meaningful copy. As far as we know, this argument has not been tested in court before, so it will be interesting to see how this will fare.

Meta also takes aim at Strike 3’s copyrights themselves. The tenth affirmative defense alleges that the adult films may incorporate others’ works without permission and may be “derivative of or copy preexisting works, including works undisclosed in Plaintiffs’ copyright filings with the U.S. Copyright Office.” Strike 3, Meta suggests, may have overstated its own copyright claims.

The remaining defenses include a statute of limitations argument, uncertainty about Strike 3’s copyrights, and a constitutional challenge arguing that the statutory damages would violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

With potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, it is clear that Meta will fight the matter tooth and nail. Alternatively, an early settlement is also an option. The case now moves forward, with mediation due by early August and a jury trial set for February 2028.

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A copy of Meta’s answer to the amended complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf). For full context, Strike 3’s amended complaint is available here (pdf).

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Posted Monday 27 July 2026 at 8:14 am AEST (my time).

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