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In July, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta.
The complaint accused the tech company of using adult films to assist its AI model training. Similar claims have been made by other rightsholders, including many book authors.
This latest case specifically focuses on Meta’s BitTorrent activity. That’s no surprise, as plaintiff Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the United States, known for targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates.
Meta Wants Lawsuit Dismissed
In late October, Meta responded to the allegations by filing a motion to dismiss at a California federal court. Taking a page from the BitTorrent piracy defense playbook, Meta argues that the IP address evidence presented by the plaintiffs is meaningless without context.
The porn producers had linked numerous Meta IP addresses to unauthorized sharing activity. According to Meta, however, there is no evidence that the alleged activity on its corporate network was centrally orchestrated by the company. In fact, it countered that many alleged downloads predate Meta’s AI training activity.
In addition to denying the allegations, the tech company offered an alternative explanation. Meta suggested that employees or visitors may have downloaded the pirated videos for personal use.
“[T]he small number of downloads—roughly 22 per year on average across dozens of Meta IP addresses—is plainly indicative of private personal use, not a concerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,” Meta wrote.
Porn Producers Counter Personal Use Defense
The plaintiffs responded to Meta’s defense this week, characterizing the “personal use” explanation as implausible, given the amount of data involved and the piracy patterns they observed.
“Plaintiffs provide data demonstrating unique patterns of Meta’s piracy suggestive of a centralized algorithm coordinating the infringements. Meta’s excuse that employees must be infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrights for ‘personal use’ does not fit the facts,” they write.
The rightsholders point out several download patterns that they believe suggest non-human involvement. Interestingly, these patterns are not linked to their own works, but to those of other rightsholders.
For example, they highlight data from June 29, 2024, suggesting that Meta’s corporate, residential, and “hidden” IP addresses all downloaded multiple different versions of Microsoft Office within hours of each other.
“No reasonable person needs this many versions of a word processing software,” they write.
Additionally, the rebuttal mentions that on April 7, 2024, various IP addresses downloaded content linked to the word “origin”, without any other obvious connection. This includes Dan Brown’s book “Origin” the game “Origin Offline Start,” and the 2023 movie “Origin”.
“This is the kind of systematic, hyper-literal search consistent with an algorithm, and not just a person casually searching for files,” the adult companies note. They suggest that downloading data for AI training, as Meta previously admitted in the books lawsuit, is the ultimate goal.
The “Tit-for-Tat” Motive
The rightsholders also offer a secondary motive to explain why Meta might want to use its videos as part of the broader AI training scheme. They suggest that the tech giant allegedly used popular adult films as ‘BitTorrent currency’.
The companies allege that these downloads would benefit BitTorrent’s reciprocal “tit-for-tat” mechanism. They previously explained in their complaint that this could boost Meta’s other download efforts.
“Meta does not produce popular creative works and thus has no ‘currency’ for the swarm of peers in the BitTorrent network. As a result, Meta must steal someone else’s cachet to stay in these swarms so that it can download files,” the opposition brief reads.
“Plaintiffs’ works are ideal. Not only do they serve as unique data for AI training, they are popular both commercially and in the BitTorrent network, ensuring that Meta could stay in swarms and download even more files,” they add.
While this is an interesting argument, our understanding of the BitTorrent protocol is that the reciprocal “tit-for-tat” advantages are limited to single torrent swarms. This means that the “currency” benefits do not extend to other downloads in different swarms. We assume that Meta’s legal team will have some thoughts on this as well.
All in all, the porn producers believe that Meta’s defenses are not up to par. They argue there is sufficient ground to survive a motion to dismiss and move the case forward, so it can be argued on its merits.
“Meta’s Motion is an attempt to thwart the protections Congress enacted in the Copyright Act. Respectfully, Plaintiffs simply ask for their day in court and ask this Court to deny the Motion.”
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A copy of the opposition brief Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed in response to Meta’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf). A hearing on the motion to dismiss is scheduled for January 21, 2026.
