The torrent protocol shares your address by design

A copyright monitor logged nearly 20,000 BitTorrent downloads from one residential AT&T line, then used a federal subpoena to tie that line to an executive in Meta’s Reality Labs division, the group that builds the Quest VR headsets. The thread from those downloads to a named person runs through the one identifier BitTorrent exposes to anyone in the swarm: an IP address, logged with a time.

That is all BitTorrent hands an observer, and it hands it to everyone in the swarm. To download a file you join its swarm, find peers through a tracker or the distributed hash table, and open direct connections to exchange pieces. Every peer you talk to learns your address, because the transfer runs point to point with nothing relaying it. A monitor does not exploit anything. It joins the swarm as an ordinary peer, records the addresses offering or requesting pieces of a torrent it cares about, and stamps each with a time. Strike 3 Holdings, an adult film producer, has built a business on that observation, filing thousands of “John Doe” suits a year: subpoena the ISP for the subscriber behind the logged IP, offer a settlement, repeat.

The John Doe case here began in March, when Strike 3 filed against the subscriber of 162.192.7.34 in a California federal court. In April, Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi granted a subpoena to AT&T and noted the name should not be made public. Strike 3 says the records identified an executive who, per his LinkedIn profile, has worked at Facebook and Meta for over a decade. His name and title are redacted; Meta has asked the court to seal them, as it did for two other people named in a separate, much larger case.

The larger case is what the motion is aimed at. Last summer Strike 3 and Counterlife Media sued Meta directly, alleging it pulled thousands of their films over BitTorrent to train AI models. With 2,973 films in play, Strike 3 puts the exposure at up to $446 million. Its new motion asks U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee to relate the John Doe matter to that suit so both run before one judge. If she agrees, Strike 3 plans to amend the complaint to name Meta, argue the executive is jointly liable, and compel Meta to appoint a Reality Labs custodian and produce its torrenting records.

Strike 3’s argument for the link is timing and volume. On March 20, 2025, it says, its general counsel emailed Meta’s lawyers forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on Meta’s corporate IPs; “just hours later,” it first recorded infringement on the executive’s home line. From that it speculates Meta “desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address.” The home connection, it says, shows nearly 20,000 files, including VR adult titles made for the Quest, and as recently as August 25 more than 150 downloads in a day, ranging from multi-language “Mega Packs” of shows, movies, software and books to what it calls AI-generated pornography. Nearly a dozen were Strike 3’s own titles. That is a lot for one person with a demanding job, the company writes, and reads more like training data or research.

Meta takes no formal position yet, saying it cannot investigate a subscriber it cannot name. But it argues that even if the subscriber is who Strike 3 claims, nothing ties the downloads to the company: Strike 3 “simply assume[s] that the Subscriber is responsible for everything done on the IP address, and then leap[s] to the additional… assumption that he did it for Meta.” That is the standard BitTorrent defense, that an IP identifies a connection rather than a person, and Judge DeMarchi raised the same caution when she approved the subpoena. Meta also notes the timing theory fights its own complaint, which alleges Meta’s “off-infra” downloading began in 2018 and that activity on corporate IPs continued well after the March 2025 notice. A sudden move to a home line, Meta writes, “cannot be logically reconciled” with that.

For anyone running infrastructure, the mechanical lesson sits apart from how the case resolves. An egress IP that joins a swarm is attributable to whoever owns the IP, the observation is passive and cheap, and outside parties do it by simply connecting. Strike 3 logged BitTorrent activity on both Meta’s corporate IPs and the executive’s home line. The subscriber on the bill gets named, not whoever ran the client, which is why Meta’s earlier explanations have leaned on personal use: it confirmed a former Reality Labs data engineer was behind a Comcast line linked to 97 films, and in the Kadrey case said a former contractor’s downloads were personal and unrelated to his work.

Judge Lee has not ruled on relating the cases. For now the executive stays anonymous, even to Meta.