A federal judge has rejected Meta\u2019s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit from Strike 3 Holdings, the company that owns popular sites like Blacked, Vixen, and Tushy, for scraping its porn videos.\u00a0The decision shows Meta\u2019s nonsensical justification for scraping massive amounts of copyrighted material from the internet in order to train its AI models, and is notable for adult content creators, who have been scraped for model training data long before the current generative AI boom.Strike 3 Holding first filed its lawsuit almost a year ago after internal Meta emails revealed in a different lawsuit showed that the company downloaded over 81 terabytes of data by scraping Anna\u2019s Archive, a massive open search search engine for torrenting copyrighted material including books, movies, TV shows, and porn. A Strike 3 Holding investigation found that 47 IP addresses belonging to Meta were used to torrent 2,396 of its videos a total of 6,008 times between 2018 and 2025. On Thursday, Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California Judge Eumi K. Lee rejected Meta\u2019s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing it to move forward.\u00a0Meta argued that Strike 3 Holdings failed to show that Meta actually intended to use Strike 3 Holdings\u2019 videos to train its AI models and that Meta, the company, was actually responsible for downloading the videos, as opposed to rogue employees downloading porn on company time from company IP addresses.\u00a0According to the judge\u2019s ruling, Strike 3 Holdings\u2019 investigation showed coordination across Meta\u2019s IP addresses that proved \u201ca coordinated effort to gather data,\u201d as opposed to the action of random employees. Specifically, Strike 3 Holdings showed that Meta\u2019s IP addresses torrented files with similar file names on the same day, ranging from porn to cartoons and sitcoms, suggesting the company was downloading files based on key terms.\u00a0\u201cFor example, IP Ranges A and F torrented the following files on December 15, 2022: \u2018Teen Sex Sessions 2 (2012),\u2019 \u2018Teen Titans Go to the Movies (2018),\u2019 \u2018Teens Love Tats XXX,\u2019 \u2018TeensLoveAnal.16.09.30.Amara,\u2019 \u2018Teenfidelity Pics,\u2019 \u2018TeensLoveAnal.16.06.10.Casey,\u2019 \u2018Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987-1996),\u2019 \u2018Teen Mom Girls Night In S02E08,\u2019 \u2018TeenyTaboo.22.12.07.Kiana,\u2019 and \u2018TeenageDelinquents.Maryjane,\u2019\u201d the decision says. \u201cOn the same day, a Corporate IP Address was used to torrent \u2018TeenCurves.22.12.09.Willow.\u2019 The connection between these files is plain: The word \u2018teen\u2019 appears in every file name.\u201dThe judge said that Meta suggesting that its IP addresses downloading all these files at the same time was the work of different individual Meta employees acting independently \u201cstrains credulity.\u201dThe judge also explained that whether Meta actually used Strike 3 Holdings\u2019 videos to train its AI models is irrelevant because Meta violated Strike 3 Holdings\u2019s copyright when it torrented its videos. It illegally downloaded the files and also \u201cseeded\u201d them, meaning they distributed the pirated to other users.\u201cIn sum, Plaintiffs [Strike 3 Holdings] have plausibly alleged that Defendant [Meta] is liable for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement based on the torrenting of their films,\u201d the decision said. \u201cDefendant\u2019s motion to dismiss is therefore DENIED.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"