The complaint was filed by Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, which are known for popular adult brands including Vixen, Tushy, Blacked, and Deeper. Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the United States, mostly targeting individual BitTorrent pirates.
The case against Meta also centers on unauthorized BitTorrent sharing but on a different scale. According to the adult companies, Meta downloaded at least 2,396 of their films since 2018, allegedly to aid their AI training.
“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 complaint reads.
The complaint
The adult producers fear that this training may ultimately result in AI models that can create similar “Hollywood grade” films at a lower cost.
“By training so specifically on Plaintiffs’ Works, Meta’s AI Movie Gen may very well soon produce full length films with Plaintiffs’ identical style and quality, which other real world adult studios cannot replicate”
Meta allegedly downloaded the copyrighted works without permission and also stands accused of uploading them to third parties, who participated in the same BitTorrent swarms. Plaintiffs allege this is backed up by data from their proprietary in-house tracking software VXN Scan.
IP Address evidence
BitTorrent transfers rely on a “tit for tat” algorithm where participants are rewarded for sharing content with others, as that significantly increases their download speeds. According to the complaint, Meta allegedly continued sharing pirated files for this purpose.
