Judge Lets Porn Studio's Copyright Lawsuit Against Meta Proceed Over Torrented Videos

Meta wanted this lawsuit gone. A federal judge said no.

Judge Eumi K. Lee of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled Thursday that Strike 3 Holdings, the company behind adult film brands Blacked, Vixen, and Tushy, can proceed with its copyright lawsuit against Meta, according to 404 Media. Meta had moved to dismiss the case. The judge rejected that motion.

Strike 3 first filed suit about a year ago, in July, after internal Meta emails surfaced in a separate lawsuit showing the company had scraped over 81 terabytes of data from Anna's Archive, a piracy search engine covering everything from books to movies to porn, according to 404 Media. Strike 3's own investigation identified 47 IP addresses tied to Meta that allegedly torrented 2,396 of its videos a combined 6,008 times between 2018 and 2025.

Strike 3 and its co-plaintiff, Counterlife Media, want $359 million in damages and a permanent ban on Meta using their material, according to Mashable.

Meta's Defense: Employees, Not the Company

Meta's argument is straightforward: this wasn't corporate policy, it was individuals. The company told the court that Strike 3 failed to show any coordinated effort, and that roughly 22 downloads a year is far too small a number to matter for training a large AI model, according to Vice. Meta's filing called the allegations "guesswork and innuendo" and argued the more "plausible inference" is that "disparate individuals downloaded adult videos for personal use."

Torrenting from corporate networks does happen, and proving a company directed specific downloads versus employees freelancing on work Wi-Fi is genuinely hard. Meta also points out that its torrenting activity reportedly began in 2018, years before the company's serious push into generative video models like Movie Gen, which undercuts the idea that this was purpose-built AI training data collection from the start.

A Meta spokesperson told The Atlantic the claims are "bogus" and noted in court filings that Strike 3 has been called a "copyright troll" by some observers, a label Vice also notes fits the company's pattern of litigation, including lawsuits against its own paying customers.

Judge Lee wasn't persuaded by the personal-use defense. Her ruling cites file-naming patterns showing multiple Meta IP address ranges downloading files with matching keywords on the same days. One example from the ruling: on December 15, 2022, Meta IP addresses reportedly torrented files including "Teen Sex Sessions 2 (2012)," "Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018)," "TeensLoveAnal.16.09.30.Amara," and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987-1996)" within the same window. The judge wrote that Meta's claim this was independent employee behavior "strains credulity."

The ruling also says whether Meta actually used the videos to train AI models doesn't even matter for the copyright claim itself. Torrenting the files and seeding them back out to other users is the alleged violation, regardless of what happened to the data afterward, according to 404 Media.

What Else Turned Up

The evidence Strike 3 collected while tracking its own videos reportedly caught a lot more than porn. According to The Atlantic, the file-transfer logs include images from the 2014 "Celebgate" hack that leaked private photos of Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst, deepfake porn using the faces of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and Gal Gadot, videos from GirlsDoPorn (a site shut down after six people connected to it were charged with sex trafficking), and blueprints for 3D-printable handguns.

Strike 3's suit also names an individual: the father of a Meta contractor, whose home IP address allegedly downloaded 97 videos. Strike 3 says that connects Meta to more infringement. Meta's counter, as Vice put it, is that it just proves somebody's dad likes porn and doesn't use a VPN.

Meta maintains its models don't touch this kind of content. "We don't want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material," a Meta spokesperson told Ars Technica, a line Mashable also reported.

What's Unresolved

The judge's ruling doesn't decide whether Meta actually used any of this material to train Llama, Movie Gen, or any other model. It decides only that Strike 3's lawsuit has enough evidence of coordinated downloading to proceed to further litigation, where that question and the extent of damages will presumably get argued out.

Meta has faced similar accusations before, including a separate lawsuit from authors over pirated books used to train Llama. The company also overhauled its chatbot rules for teenagers this year after reporting found its bots had been permitted to engage in romantic and sexually suggestive exchanges with minors, according to Mashable. No criminal charges have been filed against Meta in the Strike 3 case, and no court has yet ruled on the merits of the underlying copyright claims themselves. That fight is still ahead.