Allegedly as part of a scheme to get data for the company to train AI and develop adult VR tech while shielding it from legal liability

“In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job,” Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.

He can legally do it now!

Executive branch involving itself in Judicial proceedings, totally fine /s

Maybe, although it looks like the company is trying to say they didn't do it

However, even if the subscriber is who Strike 3 claims, Meta argues that 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,” Meta writes.

So presumably the executive himself would not be able to use an "it was for AI" defense since they don't even want to admit it

How much of that was child porn? I'll bet it's more than a few.

while shielding it from legal liability

You think the plan was to take the fall for the company? Why would he do that?

Not sure. For the sake of speculation, one possibility is that the maximum liability to Meta is billions of dollars, which they can clearly afford, but if it targeted an individual that individual could declare bankruptcy as is common in high award amount piracy lawsuits against individuals (and maybe they pay him off under the table afterwards). Maybe he just didn't think about it too hard. Maybe the risk of such a lawsuit succeeding is actually low somehow. Strike 3 seems to really want to tie it in to their existing case against Meta, probably to bump up the number of infringing works they can include:

Last summer, the company took aim at a much larger target. Together with Counterlife Media, Strike 3 sued Meta, accusing the tech giant of downloading thousands of its films via BitTorrent to train AI models. With 2,973 films at stake, the case could be worth up to $446 million

Strike 3 is the owner/partner of some high quality porn studios (tushy, vixen, etc)

i'm not saying there are no ethical problems here, but they're not some sketchy dark web child porn website

I am sure there was a lot but I doubt that is what he is being sued over.

Can I do this in my company laptop?

Yes just be one of the company heads

Imagine trying to goon and have it make national news

Yes, at least once.

He doesn't have to be training for Facebook. He can be doing it on the side. Training is training.

He didn't think they'd notice. Lots of people pirate-torrent lots of stuff all the time and get away with it.