The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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There’s a strange kind of déjà vu when a major tech company gets accused of dipping into the piracy pool — that uneasy feeling like we’ve been here before, even though each case somehow feels bigger than the last. That’s the energy swirling around the latest clash between Vixen Media Group owner Strike 3 Holdings and Meta, after Meta asked a federal judge in Northern California to toss their lawsuit.
Strike 3 didn’t pull any punches in its original complaint. They say Meta didn’t just accidentally stumble across their movies online — they accuse the company of deliberately scooping up VMG content from pirate sites to help train its AI systems. And they’re specific about it. BitTorrent, they say, is where those downloads came from. It’s the kind of accusation that makes you imagine a massive tech company hunched over a torrent client, pretending to be invisible.
Meta’s response in October? A very different story — one that almost sounds like a shrug. They told the court that if videos were downloaded, the timing and the number of those downloads “point solely to personal use, not AI training.” And then came the eyebrow-raising line:
“Meta contractors, visitors, or employees may have used Meta’s internet access over the years to download videos for personal use.”
In other words: Hey, people do stuff on our Wi-Fi. Not our problem.
Meta insisted the download activity — the volume, the pattern — just didn’t look like anything tied to large-scale AI development and “is plainly indicative of private personal use.”
They also brushed aside Strike 3’s attempt to link non-Meta IP addresses to the company, calling it a stretch.
Strike 3 fired back this week, and you can almost hear the disbelief between the lines. Their response to the “employees were just downloading porn” defense was blunt:
“Meta’s excuse that employees must be infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrights for ‘personal use’ does not fit the facts.”
What they say does fit the facts?
Something far more coordinated — something algorithmic. They point to what they call “unique patterns of Meta’s piracy,” arguing those patterns don’t look like a person casually searching for adult videos. Instead, Strike 3 claims the behavior “not only indicate[s] the use of a universal ‘script’ (likely developed, supplied, or encouraged by Meta), but also show[s] that the BitTorrent downloads are ‘for AI training data and not for personal use.’”
They bolster that argument with another recent copyright case: Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc.
In that suit, Meta “admitted to using BitTorrent to obtain digital copies” of books for AI training — and Strike 3 alleges that the same IP addresses used in the book-related downloads also appear in their own infringement logs. According to them, Meta even acknowledged in that case that it masked its corporate IPs to avoid detection.
And then comes one of the more striking accusations (no pun intended):
“Plaintiffs were able to correlate Meta’s infringement through its Corporate IPs to six hidden data centers that were used to engage in massive infringement of both Plaintiffs’ and the Kadrey plaintiffs’ works as well. The scale of these infringements is staggering and are ‘beyond what a human could consume.’”
Strike 3 says activity from those masked IP addresses mirrors the activity from Meta’s known corporate IP blocks — a kind of digital fingerprinting that, in their telling, points to one conclusion: these downloads were never about personal viewing habits. “Those ends,” they write, “were to train Meta’s AI and not for the personal use of its employees.”
And if the court believes that interpretation?
Meta wouldn’t just be facing another infringement spat. The numbers involved are enormous — the complaint lists at least 2,396 allegedly infringed movies. Multiply that by the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work, and you land at a number that barely feels real: $359.4 million.
But the money, oddly enough, may not be the part that echoes the loudest. This lawsuit drops the adult industry directly into the center of the broader fight over whether training an AI model on copyrighted material counts as “fair use” — or whether it’s just a slicker version of old-school piracy wearing a futuristic badge.
No one really knows yet how courts will treat AI training that leans on protected works. Everyone’s waiting for the first big ruling — the one that will set the tone for all the cases piling up behind it. And maybe that’s the real story here: not just whether Meta downloaded some videos, but whether we’re watching the early days of a legal shift that’s going to redraw the boundaries of ownership, creativity, and machine learning.
Because if AI is the future, then this messy, uncomfortable question is coming along for the ride whether Silicon Valley likes it or not.
