Strike 3 ties a 'John Doe' torrent case to its $446M AI-training suit against Meta

Strike 3 Holdings, an adult film producer with a long-running campaign of BitTorrent lawsuits, has asked a California federal court to connect one of its routine "John Doe" cases to a far larger dispute with Meta. In a motion filed last week, the company says the anonymous subscriber behind a residential AT&T connection is an executive in Meta's Reality Labs division, which builds the Quest VR headsets.

From a subpoena to an executive

The case began in March with a complaint against the subscriber of IP address 162.192.7.34. In April, Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi granted a subpoena to AT&T while noting that the name should not be publicly disclosed. After AT&T responded, Strike 3 says its investigation identified the subscriber as a Reality Labs executive who, according to his LinkedIn profile, has worked at Facebook and Meta for more than a decade. His name and title are redacted, and Meta has asked the court to keep them sealed.

Timing and volume

Strike 3 argues the downloads look nothing like ordinary home piracy. On March 20, 2025, its general counsel emailed Meta's lawyers forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the company's corporate addresses, and "just hours later", the motion says, infringement was first recorded on the executive's home connection — which the company suggests may indicate a move to a hidden line to avoid detection. It logged nearly 20,000 files from that connection, including VR adult titles made for Quest, with more than 150 daily downloads as recently as August 25.

The larger case and Meta's response

Last summer, Strike 3 and Counterlife Media sued Meta, accusing it of downloading thousands of their films over BitTorrent to train AI models; with 2,973 films at stake, the case could be worth up to $446 million. Strike 3 now wants U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee to relate the two cases and, if she does, plans to name Meta directly and seek its torrenting records. Meta took no formal position this week but says nothing ties the downloads to the company: "They simply assume that the Subscriber is responsible for everything done on the IP address, and then leap to the additional, similarly unsupported assumption that he did it for Meta." It also notes that Strike 3's own complaint dates Meta's "off-infra" activity to 2018 and says corporate downloading continued long after the 2025 notice, which it argues cannot be reconciled with the new theory. The executive remains anonymous, even to Meta.