To keep their piracy lawsuit alive, adult film producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media don't have to prove Meta used their films for AI training. A California federal judge has denied Meta's motion to dismiss, ruling that the alleged torrenting is itself the infringement. Additionally, the court did not accept the idea that the torrent downloads were merely for personal use.
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.
In October 2025, 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.
In an order released last week, U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee refused to throw the case out. In a 16-page order, she denied Meta’s motion and let all three of Strike 3’s direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement claims proceed.
One of Meta’s lead arguments was that, in order to prove direct infringement, Strike 3 had to show its films were actually used to train a model. However, Judge Lee explained that this is not needed, as Meta’s alleged copying of the films via BitTorrent is copyright infringement.
“Because Plaintiffs have adequately pleaded that their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act were violated when their films were torrented, they have satisfied the second element, regardless of whether their films were used to train specific AI models,” the order reads.
Another key question was whether the torrenting activity can be attributed to Meta, or if the downloads came from employees, who downloaded content for personal use.
Strike 3 argued that the actions were coordinated by Meta, showing similar download patterns across 47 corporate IP addresses and seven hidden ranges. This includes files with the same keywords downloaded on the same day.
Judge Lee found the coincidence theory implausible and pointed at a spreadsheet of addresses grabbing files with “teen” in the title, from “Teen Titans” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” through to explicit adult releases.
“The word “teen” appears in every file name. Similar patterns are shown repeatedly across the identified IP addresses. It strains credulity to suggest that these correlations are mere coincidence and the product of individual human selections,” Judge Lee noted.
“Instead, the many commonalities across files permit a reasonable inference that the downloads were operated by an algorithm using key terms, which accounts for why pornography was downloaded alongside children’s cartoons and sitcoms.”
Other download patterns also appeared to be illogical. For example, multiple IP-addresses from various ranges torrented eight episodes of Ted Lasso out of order, on a single day. Meta suggested that this could be coincidental download activity by several people, but Judge Lee believes this to be unlikely.
“But the odds that multiple people using the Corporate IP Addresses and the IP Ranges coincidentally torrented the same show, rather than simply streaming it, on the exact same day strains belief…”, Judge Lee writes.
The contributory copyright infringement claim also survives. While the motion to dismiss was pending, the Supreme Court handed down Cox Communications v. Sony, raising the bar for contributory infringement. However, that wasn’t enough to help Meta at this stage.
Judge Lee recognized that, if Meta merely offered its infrastructure to copyright infringers, this would not be sufficient to trigger liability.
“Standing alone, Plaintiffs’ allegation that Defendant ‘provid[ed] access to its servers, data centers, IP addresses, computers, networks, [and] accounts’ would be insufficient under Cox Communications,” she wrote.
However, Strike 3’s allegation went further, alleging that Meta encouraged copyright infringement by offering specific tools and services for it.
“Plaintiffs plausibly allege that Defendant took active steps to encourage torrenting by implementing an algorithm and establishing VPCs – tools tailored to infringe copyrighted works using BitTorrent.”
The vicarious copyright infringement also survived the motion to dismiss. According to Judge Lee, Meta has a direct financial interest in amassing high-quality training data for its commercial AI products.
While Meta’s motion to dismiss failed on all claims, the company’s defenses could still succeed further down the line, when the evidence is reviewed in detail.
For example, Meta argued that testimony in a related case shows that its torrenting servers went live in 2024, not 2018, so they cannot be the same infrastructure behind ranges active for years.
Additionally, Meta said much of the infringing activity in this case took place years before the company started training its video models. Those and other points will be contested in detail as the case proceeds.
For now, the case heads into discovery. Meta must answer the complaint, the parties are due to attempt mediation by early August, and a jury trial is set for February 2028.
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A copy of Judge Eumi K. Lee’s order denying Meta’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf).
Source: Torrent Freak