Judge Eumi Lee denied Meta’s motion to dismiss Strike 3’s lawsuit, allowing claims to proceed that Meta illegally downloaded 2,973 copyrighted adult videos through BitTorrent.
Court records cited by Lee say the download patterns did not look like personal viewing; she wrote Meta’s coincidence defense “strains belief” and pointed to likely “algorithmically coordinated behavior.”
Strike 3’s evidence also alleges Meta’s networks downloaded other illicit material over two years, including Celebgate images, deepfake celebrity porn, 19 functional 3-D-printable gun files and a 5.7 million-password list.
BitTorrent logs reviewed by a University of Birmingham cybersecurity professor were described as establishing that people on Meta’s networks uploaded Strike 3 videos too, with some files allegedly seeded for up to three months.
The case adds to broader scrutiny of AI developers’ data-gathering practices, after other lawsuits showed companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic used BitTorrent to obtain copyrighted material.