Lawsuit says Meta pirated and distributed porn to train its AI

A new lawsuit filed by two companies in the adult film industry claims that Meta has torrented copyrighted adult film content for years in order to train its AI models.

Strike 3 Holdings, a pornographic film holding company, along with Counterlife Media, filed the lawsuit in a US Court District in California on Friday, alleging that Meta “willfully and intentionally” infringed at least 2,396 copyrighted movies since 2018. The company is the most active copyright litigant in the U.S., according to TorrentFreak, and regularly targets BitTorrent pirates.

According to the suit, Meta downloaded adult film content “for purposes of acquiring content to train its Meta Movie Gen, Large Language Model (‘LLaMA’), as well as various other Meta AI Models that rely on video training content.” Meta is accused of downloading copyrighted works without permission and with the purpose of distribution “in order to accelerate its downloads of vast amounts of other content.”

Popular torrenting networks don’t just allow users to download media files. Torrenting is a form of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which users download pieces of files from other users. The suit alleges that not only did Meta download copyrighted adult works, but that it made these files available to others, and benefited from doing so. Mashable has reached out to Meta for comment.

Strike 3 Holdings, which says its sites attract over 25 million monthly visitors, is now seeking extensive damages that could amount to $359 million. And, according to Ars Technica, the company is also asking for an injunction to permanently ban Meta from using its content again.

Meta has previously been sued over its AI model training, with a major copyright and fair use case filed against the tech giant by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Junot Diaz. Recently, Meta won a ruling against these authors, who claimed the company used their copyrighted works without permission. As Mashable’s Cecily Mauran reported, “At the heart of these fights is a battle of values: the rights and livelihoods of artists versus technological innovation at all costs.”

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.