Meta moves to dismiss 'meager, uncoordinated' adult content piracy lawsuit

Meta Platforms has asked a United States court to dismiss a lawsuit that accused the company of illegally downloading and distributing thousands of adult contents to train its artificial intelligence systems. Filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, the motion to dismiss argues that there is no evidence to support these claims.

In its filing, Meta claims that there is no evidence pointing to the fact that its models contain or were trained using copyrighted materials. The company also claimed that the allegations are “nonsensical and unsupported.” The motion was first reported by Ars Technica, with Meta issuing a direct denial, noting that the claims are bogus.

Plaintiffs have gone “to great lengths to stitch this narrative together with guesswork and innuendo, but their claims are neither cogent nor supported by well-pleaded facts,” the motion reads.

Meta wants the court to dismiss adult content piracy lawsuit

The original complaint was filed in July by Strike 3 Holdings. The platform alleged that Meta used corporate and concealed IP addresses to torrent nearly 2,400 adult movies since 2018. It claimed that the move was part of the company’s broader efforts to build multimodal artificial intelligence systems. Strike 3 is an adult film holding base in Miami, distributing content under brands like Vixen, Tushy, and Blacked, among others.

In its motion, Meta argues that the scale and pattern of alleged downloads contradict Strike 3’s AI training theory. Over the past seven years, only 157 adult contents produced by Strike were allegedly downloaded using Meta’s corporate IP addresses. This puts it at an average of around 22 downloads per year across 47 different IP addresses.

Angela Dunning, Meta’s attorney, characterized the lawsuit as “meager, uncoordinated activity” from “disparate individuals.”

Dunning attributed the downloads to individuals, noting that they were for personal use, and not part of an effort by the tech giant to gather data for AI training as Strike 3 alleges. The motion also pushes back on Strike 3’s claims that Meta used more than 2,500 hidden third-party IP addresses, noting that Strike 3 did not verify the addresses and instead made loose correlations. It claimed that one of the IP ranges is allegedly connected to a Hawaiian nonprofit with no link to Meta, while others have no identified owner.

Meta also claimed that there is no proof that it knew about the alleged downloads, and neither is there proof that it could have stopped them. It also added that it gained nothing from them and that monitoring every file on its global network would be neither simple nor required by law.

Dermot McGrath, co-founder of venture capital firm Ryzen Labs, said, “If Meta admitted the data was used in models, they’d have to argue fair use, justify the inclusion of pirated content, and open themselves to discovery of their internal training and audit systems.” He also added that instead of denying how the data was used, Meta has chosen to deny that it ever used it at all. However, McGrath claims that if the court admits the defense, it could open “a massive loophole.”

He claims that it could “effectively undermine copyright protection for AI training data cases” such that future cases would need “stronger evidence of corporate direction, which companies would simply get better at hiding.”

Still, there are legitimate reasons to use explicit content, with some companies using it to develop safety or moderation tools. “Most major AI companies have ‘red teams’ whose job is to probe models for weaknesses by using harmful prompts and trying to get the AI to generate explicit, dangerous, or prohibited content,” McGrath said.

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