In a ruling issued late last week, U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee denied a motion to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed against Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms Inc. by Strike 3 Holdings, the company behind adult brands like Vixen, Tushy and Blacked.
Filed in July of last year, the complaint by Strike 3 included claims for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement, stemming from an investigation by the company that revealed activity by 47 IP addresses associated with Meta that allegedly torrented films owned by Strike 3 157 times from 2018 to 2025.
Meta moved to dismiss the complaint under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), asserting that the complaint failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted by the court.
As noted in Judge Lee’s decision, Strike 3 alleges “that their films were downloaded from and uploaded to peers in the BitTorrent network” – a fact Meta doesn’t dispute in its response (at this stage of the case, at least). Nor does Meta “dispute that downloading and uploading are infringing acts of reproduction and distribution,” so Lee accordingly found “Plaintiffs’ allegations are sufficient to satisfy the second element of a direct infringement claim.”
Lee highlighted Meta’s assertion that “required to allege that their films were used to train specific AI models,” writing that the defendant “incorrectly extrapolates this pleading requirement from two other cases that involved a different theory of infringement.”
“The plaintiffs in In re Google GenAI and In re Mosaic LLM were required to allege that their works were used to train defendants’ AI models because they claimed that defendants made unauthorized copies ‘during the model training process,’” Lee wrote, referencing the cases cited by Meta in the motion to dismiss. “By contrast, in this case Plaintiffs allege that torrenting is the infringing act of reproduction and distribution. Because Plaintiffs have adequately pleaded that their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act were violated when their films were torrented, they have satisfied the second element, regardless of whether their films were used to train specific AI models.”
Lee also noted that in the motion to dismiss, Meta also argued that Strike 3 have “failed to allege causation because the complaint does not plausibly show that Defendant – as opposed its many employees, ‘contractors, visitors, and third parties [who] access the internet at Meta every day’– caused the infringing activity.”
“The court disagrees,” Lee wrote. Distinguishing between cases cited by Meta and the case before the court, Lee observed that Strike 3 “do not rely solely on Defendant’s status as the subscriber to the Corporate IP Addresses.”
“Rather, Plaintiffs’ investigation shows seeming coordination across all the identified IP addresses, which Plaintiffs contend must not be coincidence,” Lee added. “The Court agrees, finding that the allegations are sufficient to infer a coordinated effort to gather data – whether Plaintiffs’ works were specifically targeted, as they allege, or not – which is enough to survive the motion to dismiss.”
Lee noted that Strike 3’s investigation “shows that the IP addresses torrented files with similar file names on the same day, ranging from pornography to cartoons and sitcoms, suggesting that an algorithm downloaded files based on key terms.”
“For example, IP Ranges A and F torrented the following files on December 15, 2022: ‘Teen Sex Sessions 2 (2012),’ ‘Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018),’ ‘Teens Love Tats XXX,’ ‘TeensLoveAnal.16.09.30.Amara,’ ‘Teenfidelity Pics,’ ‘TeensLoveAnal.16.06.10.Casey,’ ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987-1996),’ ‘Teen Mom Girls Night In S02E08,’ ‘TeenyTaboo.22.12.07.Kiana,’ and ‘TeenageDelinquents.Maryjane.’. On the same day, a Corporate IP Address was used to torrent ‘TeenCurves.22.12.09.Willow,’” Lee wrote. “The connection between these files is plain: The word ‘teen’ appears in every file name. Similar patterns are shown repeatedly across the identified IP addresses.”
Lee added that it “strains credulity to suggest that these correlations are mere coincidence and the product of individual human selections.”
“Instead, the many commonalities across files permit a reasonable inference that the downloads were operated by an algorithm using key terms, which accounts for why pornography was downloaded alongside children’s cartoons and sitcoms,” the judge added.
Ultimately, the court found that Strike 3 has “plausibly alleged that Defendant is liable for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement based on the torrenting of their films.”
This does not mean Meta will eventually be found liable for all these claims. Motions to dismiss must meet a high bar and are rarely granted, in part because, as Judge Lee noted, in considering a motion to dismiss, the court must interpret “all reasonable inferences in favor of the non-moving party.”
Unsurprisingly, Meta disagreed with the court’s decision to permit the lawsuit to go forward.
“We disagree with the court’s decision,” a Meta spokesperson said, per CourthouseNews.com. “These claims are bogus: We don’t want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material.”
Thus far, at least, the court appears to disagree.
Gavel image by Katrin Bolovtsova from Pexels
