The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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Strike 3 Holdings, a company that describes its films as “high quality,” “feminist,” and “ethical” adult videos, has filed a lawsuit against Meta in federal court in California, accusing the tech giant of infringing its copyrights by using Strike 3’s content to train artificial intelligence models. The complaint, filed in July, claims Meta has been torrenting and seeding the company’s videos since 2018. Supporting exhibits and details were unsealed last week.
According to the lawsuit, Meta sought Strike 3’s content because it offered angles and extended uninterrupted scenes that are “rare in mainstream movies and TV,” allegedly giving Meta an edge in developing what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls AI “superintelligence.”
“They have an interest in getting our content because it can give them a competitive advantage for the quality, fluidity, and humanity of the AI,” said Christian Waugh, an attorney for Strike 3.
The filing alleges Meta BitTorrented and distributed 2,396 of Strike 3’s copyrighted videos, making them accessible to minors since the BitTorrent protocol does not include age verification. The complaint further asserts that Meta used the adult videos “for distribution as currency to support its downloading of a vast array of other content necessary to train its AI models.”
The exhibits list not only Strike 3 titles but also mainstream television shows such as Yellowstone, Modern Family, The Bachelor, South Park, and Downton Abbey. They also include pornographic videos produced by others that appear to feature very young actors, with titles such as ExploitedTeens, Anal Teens, and EuroTeenErotica. In addition, the list contains files related to weapons (3D Gun Print, Gun Digest Shooter’s Guide to the AR-15) and political material (Antifa’s Radical Plan and Intellectual Property Rights in Cyberspace).
Using adult content as training data is “a public relations disaster waiting to happen,” said Matthew Sag, a professor of law specializing in artificial intelligence at Emory University. “Imagine a middle school student asks a Meta AI model for a video about pizza delivery, and before you know it, it’s porn.”
Strike 3 says it identified the alleged violations through infringement-detection systems it operates and traced activity to 47 Meta-affiliated IP addresses. The company is seeking $350 million in statutory damages.
Christopher Sgro, a Meta spokesperson, said: “We’re reviewing the complaint, but we don’t believe Strike’s claims are accurate.”
The lawsuit draws attention to Meta’s V-JEPA 2 “world model,” released in June, which the company says was trained on 1 million hours of “internet video,” a term the complaint highlights as vague. Zuckerberg has described Meta’s goal as putting “the power of superintelligence into people’s hands to direct it toward what they value in their own lives.”
According to the complaint, Meta executives deliberately approved the use of pirated material, with Zuckerberg’s sign-off. Nearly every major AI company faces similar copyright suits.
“The case being presented against Meta is perhaps the case of the century because of the sheer scope of infringement,” Waugh said, adding that the unsealed exhibits represent only “a thin slice of the pie.”
AI companies often defend themselves by claiming that their technologies are “transformative” and thus protected under fair use. Former President Donald Trump voiced support for this view in July, saying: “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, or anything else that you’ve read or studied you’re supposed to pay for.”
In June, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that Meta did not break the law in training its AI models on the works of 13 authors in a separate case, Kadrey v. Meta. However, he clarified that the decision “stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”
That leaves the door open for Strike 3 to mount a stronger case. “The best version of their argument is: This is a fundamental problem because, by going to these pirate websites, you are undermining the market for access,” Sag explained.
Waugh argued that the dispute underscores a broader issue. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a four-sentence poem or adult entertainment. There is no appetite in this country for what AI companies appear to be doing, which is making money off the backs of rights holders who never gave permission for it.”
