Meta sued for allegedly pirating adult films to train AI models
Two adult film production companies filed a copyright lawsuit against Meta in California federal court, alleging the company downloaded at least 2,396 of their movies via BitTorrent since 2018 to train AI models. Meta allegedly distributed the pirated content to others through BitTorrent swarms to accelerate its downloads, and the plaintiffs seek up to $359 million in statutory damages.
What happened
Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright lawsuit against Meta in California federal court, alleging that Meta illicitly downloaded at least 2,396 of their copyrighted adult films via BitTorrent since 2018 for training AI systems including Meta Movie Gen and LLaMA.
The plaintiffs claim Meta not only downloaded the films without permission but also uploaded them to third parties in BitTorrent swarms to accelerate downloads. The studios discovered the alleged infringements after Meta's BitTorrent activity was revealed in a separate lawsuit filed by book authors, in which Meta admitted to obtaining content from pirate sources.
Reported impact
The lawsuit alleges that Meta's unauthorized use could result in AI models capable of creating similar high-quality adult content at lower cost, potentially threatening the studios' business model.
The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of $150,000 per work for willful infringement, which could total $359 million based on 2,396 movies, and an injunction to ban Meta from using their content.
Index analysis
The adult film studios tracked Meta's activity using proprietary BitTorrent monitoring software (VXN Scan) and identified 47 IP addresses owned by Meta that allegedly infringed their copyrights. The studios allege Meta deliberately continued sharing pirated files to capitalize on BitTorrent's 'tit for tat' algorithm, which rewards faster downloads.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.