Porn Producer Unmasks “John Doe”: The Pirate Turned Out to Be a Meta Executive

For more than a decade, rights holders have used U.S. federal courts to unmask the identities of anonymous BitTorrent users. Adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings has turned this into an industry of its own, filing thousands of “John Doe” lawsuits every year: the provider is ordered to name the subscriber, the subscriber is offered a settlement — and the case is closed. Round and round it goes.

Last summer the company set its sights on a bigger target. Together with Counterlife Media, it accused Meta of downloading thousands of its films via BitTorrent to train AI models. At stake are 2,973 titles, and the lawsuit could seek as much as $446 million.

From “John Doe” to Reality Labs Director

Strike 3 opened a separate case against an unnamed AT&T subscriber back in March. After obtaining data from the provider, the company claims that the home connection belongs to a director in the Reality Labs division, which develops the Quest VR headsets. According to Strike 3, his LinkedIn lists more than a decade of experience at Facebook and Meta. His name and title are sealed — Meta asked the court to keep them under wraps.

Strike 3's main argument is the timing. On March 20, 2025, the plaintiff's attorneys first sent Meta evidence of torrent activity from its corporate addresses. “Just a few hours later, we recorded the first infringement from John Doe's home IP,” the motion states. From this it concludes that the activity may have been deliberately moved to a “hidden” home address.

Nearly 20,000 files

Strike 3 counted roughly 20,000 files from this connection: multilingual “mega-packs” of TV series, films, software and books, AI-generated pornography, and adult VR films, including some made for the Quest. On August 25 alone, more than 150 downloads were recorded in a single day. “That's rather a lot for one person, especially with a demanding job,” the company quips, hinting that the picture looks more like data collection for AI training than a personal hobby.

This is not the first such case: Meta previously acknowledged that a Comcast connection belonged to a former engineer in the same division, linked to 97 films.

“Nothing connects the downloads to the company”

Strike 3 is asking to consolidate both cases before a single judge, then name Meta directly as a defendant and demand that it hand over its torrent logs. Meta has taken no official position — it cannot verify whether this is its employee without knowing the name. But even if it is, the company insists that an IP address does not point to a specific infringer, and that home downloads have nothing to do with work.

Meta also points to a contradiction: by Strike 3's own lawsuit, the “outside” activity began as far back as 2018 and continued from corporate addresses even after the March warning — so the theory of a hasty “move” to a home IP does not square with the earlier accusations. The court has yet to rule, and the executive's identity remains a mystery even to Meta itself.

Source: Hacker News