“Copyright troll” accuses Meta of pirating porn to train AI

A boutique porn production company, Strike 3 Holdings, has accused Meta of illegally torrenting its porn to train artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Meta has asked the courts to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the big tech company illegally downloaded pornography to train its AI.

Strike 3 allegedly found that the tech company had illegally downloaded its adult movies using hidden IP addresses to train its Movie Gen model and its LLM, Llama.

A motion to dismiss the lawsuit discovered by Ars Technica alleges that Meta downloaded 157 of Strike 3’s pornographic films via the peer-to-peer file sharing service, BitTorrent, between 2018 and 2025.

The “high-end” porn studio claims that it identified “forty-seven IP addresses owned by Facebook” and roughly 22 works were illegally downloaded over the seven-year period.

Strike 3 claims that it “confirmed each IP address” used by Meta with IP address geolocation technology from the company MaxMind.

Meta also apparently torrented works using roughly 2,500 third-party IP addresses, according to Strike 3 allegations.

The porn production company reached this conclusion based on their identification of “certain correlations in the data patterns of downloads using Meta and non-Meta IP addresses between December 11th, 2022, and December 12th, 2024,” the motion to dismiss alleges.

Meta claims that Strike 3 has gone to “great lengths to stitch this narrative together” using “guesswork and innuendo” to support its claims.

The porn production company has been recognized by the Court for filing thousands of complaints of this nature and is apparently known for its “extortive lawsuits.”

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The Southern California porn maker was dubbed a “copyright troll” by one John Doe in 2018, who was apparently “shamed” by the porn company for watching its content via BitTorrent.

The lawsuit alleged that Strike 3 can only identify users potentially using BitTorrent to download its works via IP address geolocation tracking, which is “famously flawed.”

This same technique is now being used against Meta, which states that there’s no concrete evidence to suggest that the tech giant used its work to train its AI models.

Furthermore, Meta argues that the small number of downloads indicates that Strike 3’s porn was downloaded for “private personal use.”

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