Adult film production company Strike 3 Holdings sued Meta, accusing the company of stealing pornography to secretly train an unannounced adult version of its AI model, Movie Gen. In response, Meta asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the uploads were for “private personal use.”
Adult film production company Strike 3 Holdings sued Meta, accusing the company of stealing pornography to secretly train an unannounced adult version of its AI model, Movie Gen. In response, Meta asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the uploads were for “private personal use.”
Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, known for popular adult brands including Vixen, Tushy, Blacked and Deeper, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in California federal court over the summer. The companies allege that Meta has downloaded at least 2,396 of their films since 2018, allegedly to train its AI model on the videos, TorrentFreak reports .
Adult content producers revealed the alleged violations after Meta's BitTorrent activities were exposed in a lawsuit filed by several book authors . In that case, Meta admitted to obtaining content from pirated sources.
In response, Strike 3 and Counterlife Media searched their BitTorrent archive for IP addresses related to Meta. The scan found 47 IP addresses identified as belonging to Facebook, which they claimed violated their copyrights.
Adult content producers are suing for up to $359 million in damages.
However, this week Meta asked the court to dismiss what it calls the “frivolous” lawsuit for the following reasons:
Instead, Meta claims that the evidence “clearly indicates” that the adult-labeled content was downloaded via torrent for “private personal use.” This is evidenced by the small, low volume of downloads associated with Meta IP addresses and its employees, which amounted to only “a few dozen titles per year, received intermittently, one file at a time.”
"A much more plausible conclusion to draw from such scant, uncoordinated activity is that various individuals were uploading adult videos for personal use," Meta said in a statement.
Furthermore, Meta claims that this alleged activity cannot even be reliably linked to any Meta employee.
Perhaps most puzzling to Meta, however, is the allegation in Strike 3’s complaint about a “secret network” of hidden IP addresses. This creates “another mystery” that Strike 3 “does not reveal,” Meta suggested, writing: “Why would Meta seek to ‘hide’ certain alleged uploads of Plaintiffs’ and third-party content, but use Meta’s easily traceable corporate IP addresses for many hundreds of others?”
Meta hopes the court will agree that Strike 3 failed to prove the company's involvement in illegal downloads. According to TorrentFreak, Strike 3 has two weeks to respond.
