SAN FRANCISCO — Vixen Media Group owner Strike 3 Holdings filed suit in federal court this week, accusing Facebook parent company Meta of copyright infringement and alleging that Meta has extensively pirated VMG content to train its artificial intelligence models.
“Defendant’s infringement is intentional,” reads the complaint, filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. “Defendant downloaded Plaintiffs’ Works from pirate sources for purposes of acquiring content to train its Meta Movie Gen, Large Language Model (“LLaMA”), as well as various other Meta AI Models that rely on video training content.”
The suit specifically mentions BitTorrent as the source from which Meta allegedly acquired pirated copies of copyrighted VMG works.
Pursuant to U.S. copyright law, Strike 3 and subsidiary Counterlife Media are seeking statutory damages per infringed work. Due to the high volume of alleged violations — the suit states, "Defendant has infringed at least 2,396 movies owned by Plaintiffs" — those damages could amount to $359.4 million dollars, assuming the court awards statutory damages of the maximum $150,000 per infringed work.
“Meta stands to profit billions from its AI models, and obtaining content, including Plaintiffs’ Works from BitTorrent, enables Meta to avoid licensing Plaintiffs’ and others’ Works,” the suit notes.
As XBIZ has reported, Strike 3 has for years pursued a strategy of filing infringement lawsuits in federal court against unauthorized downloaders of its content. The suit against Meta, however, dwarfs those cases in scale.
In addition, the suit also involves the adult industry in the current wave of litigation around the use of copyrighted materials to train AI, as jurisprudence continues to evolve around what constitutes “fair use” in the age of AI. Meta recently won a case brought by prominent authors who alleged that the company violated copyright law by using their written works to train its AI system without their permission, while AI firm Anthropic and other companies have faced similar suits.
