Meta Says the 2,400 'Adult Movies' They Torrented Were for Personal Use

From the linked Ars article:

> Notably, the flagged downloads spanned seven years, starting in 2018. That’s about four years before Meta’s AI efforts “researching Multimodal Models and Generative Video” began

> Instead, Meta argued, available evidence “is plainly indicative” that the flagged adult content was torrented for “private personal use”—since the small amount linked to Meta IP addresses and employees represented only “a few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time.”

Personal use sounds plausible to me when imagining something like 70k employees and a bit of a "bro" culture.

> argues the supposed downloads, which are roughly 22 per year

the math doesn't add up since that implies it took 100+ years to accumulate 2400 violations, but just looking at 2400 torrents, how many employees does Meta have? With at least several thousand guys, if some have poor 'keeping work and home separate' hygiene, and especially with work-from-home, they probably just forgot to disconnect from VPN after work. Seems more likely than a very sloppy AI training scheme. If they wanted to so such a scheme, it's so easy to do using a public VPN.

EDIT: If I'm reading right, they're actually just basing their suit on HOME IP addresses. So we're being asked to believe the plan was:

1. Top secret porn AI plan is hatched

2. Management considers how to accomplish this and decided the best course of action is to tell dozens of engineers to go home and download a handful of porn torrents each and bring them into work to train it.

3. ???

4. Profit!

>From the article: this amounts to only about 20 videos per year and the evidence is based on home IP addresses of employees. Such as: “The father of a Meta contractor whose home IP address allegedly downloaded 97 videos. Strike 3 suggests this links Meta to more infringement. Meta counters that it only proves someone’s dad is super into porn and has no VPN”.

The linked article mentions there was torrenting activity from Meta's ip blocks as well:

>This prompted Strike 3 and Counterlife Media to search for Meta-linked IP addresses in their archive of collected BitTorrent data. This scan revealed that forty-seven IP addresses, identified as owned by Facebook, allegedly infringed their copyrighted works.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if it turned out employees downloaded porn on company computers 2400 times at company the size of Meta.

Another article explains that there were more IPs (not officially registered for Meta) and more movies [1]

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-lawsuit-accuses-meta-of-p...