Federal Judge Allows Porn Company to Sue Meta Over AI Training Copyright Infringement

Ekhbary News Agency | 2024-07-20

A federal judge in the United States has denied Meta's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the tech giant violated copyright law by illegally downloading pornographic films to train its artificial intelligence. On June 11, U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee filed the order, asserting that Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media had plausibly alleged Meta's liability for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement based on the torrenting of their content.

Lawsuit Details and Allegations

The lawsuit, initially filed by Strike 3 Holdings in July 2025, claims that between 2018 and 2025, Meta infringed upon more than 2,300 copyrighted pornographic movies. These films were allegedly downloaded using the BitTorrent program to train Meta's AI models. The suit highlights that IP addresses traceable to Meta's corporate offices exhibited "non-human patterns" of "mass infringement beyond what a human could consume." The plaintiff companies are seeking damages totaling up to $359 million.

Meta's Defense and Judicial Rejection

Meta filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in October, branding the claims as "nonsensical and unsupported" and arguing that the downloads were for "personal use." However, Judge Lee, in her order, pointed to suspicious download patterns, such as IP addresses torrenting similar files with identical names—ranging from cartoons to porn—all on the same day. She remarked, "It strains credulity to suggest that these correlations are mere coincidence and the product of individual human selections." To some extent, this ruling underscores the judiciary's growing scrutiny of AI training data acquisition practices.