The high-stakes lawsuit between adult content producers and tech giant Meta over the alleged downloads of copyright-infringing videos is heating up. In a new filing, Strike 3 claims that a Meta employee allegedly deleted over 9 terabytes of torrented files. Meta notes that this claim, which originates from an unrelated case, is mischaracterized and irrelevant. Regardless of the outcome of these and other ongoing discovery disputes, both parties aim for a trial in 2028.
From the article, the 9tb are related to the other case, which is about book data.
Meta’s response that this is personal use is actually a pretty good argument. This case mentions something like 157 downloads over the last seven years. That does sound like it could be random employees. Plausibly.
But wouldn’t their IT infrastructure block random employees from running torrents on the network? If it was company directed, wouldn’t they use like a VPN from some regular common VPN provider so that this all looked like some random Joe downloading porn rather than Meta? It does mention they allegedly have some “secret” IPs on AWS, which is also funny to me.
But what if the people in question are the IT guys?
Not if the employees in question control the IT infrastructure.
Nah, for a company that size they’d get DMCA notices and legal would shut it down. That’s why my job finally blocked torrenting.
It’s possible that this is what happened.
9TB of torrents isn’t a huge amount, I seed more than that in just a few weeks on a personal/small group seedbox. You could download 9TB in an hour or two if you had a datacenter’s link speed and hardware.
I don’t know any self respecting sysadmin that doesn’t block P2P in their network. Most enterprise nowadays don’t even require any fancy set up, it’s a toggle switch away. I don’t buy the “oopsie we didn’t know” excuse. They were permitted to torrent by design.