SAN FRANCISCO — A U.S. district court on Thursday rejected Facebook parent company Meta’s motion to dismiss a suit by Vixen Media Group owner Strike 3 Holdings, which accuses Meta of pirating VMG content to train its artificial intelligence models.
As XBIZ reported last year, Strike 3 alleged in its complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that Meta intentionally infringed on its copyrights by downloading VMG-owned content from pirate sources to train various Meta AI models.
In October, Meta filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the timing and number of the downloads cited by Strike 3 indicated “personal use, not AI training.” Meta also rejected Strike 3’s claims attributing numerous downloads made from non-Meta IP addresses to Meta as well.
In response, Strike 3 argued that Meta’s claim that its employees must be infringing plaintiffs’ copyrights for “personal use” did not fit the facts. Instead, Strike 3 asserted, the “unique patterns of Meta’s piracy” suggest “a centralized algorithm coordinating the infringements.”
In Thursday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee denied Meta’s motion to dismiss, explaining that Strike 3 adequately demonstrated that its copyrights were violated, that there appears to have been “a coordinated effort to gather data,” and that this seeming coordination supports Strike 3’s allegation that Meta was behind the IP addresses involved.
“Plaintiffs have therefore sufficiently alleged that Defendant engaged in a coordinated effort to gather data through BitTorrent, including by torrenting plaintiffs’ films,” Lee wrote, adding that Strike 3’s allegation that the infringement was “authorized, ordered, or performed” by Meta “rests on adequate factual foundations.”
Lee also found that Strike 3 had adequately argued that Meta has a financial interest in the alleged infringement and ordered the use of BitTorrent to infringe copyrighted works.
“Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Defendant is liable for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement based on the torrenting of their films,” the ruling concludes.
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 claims infringement on at least 2,396 movies — those damages could amount to $359.4 million, should the court award statutory damages of the maximum $150,000 per infringed work.
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.
