August 24, 2012 - Recently, twoAdult movieproduction companies -- Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, to tech giants Meta The lawsuit alleges that Meta has "willfully and intentionally" infringed on at least 2,396 copyrighted films that were used to train its AI models since 2018.
According to a complaint filed in California on Friday, the two production companies are seeking massive damages that could total $359 million (note: current exchange rate is about 2.576 billion yuan). According to TorrentFreak, Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the U.S., targeting individual users who pirate and share movies via BitTorrent, a way to download and share files from the Internet, and the lawsuit against Meta revolves around unauthorized use of BitTorrent.
The complaint states that Meta knowingly obtained these movies from pirate sources in order to obtain content to train its Meta Movie Gen, Large Language Model (LLaMA), and other Meta AI models that rely on video training content. The companies also accused Meta of trying to profit from the "reciprocity algorithm" delivered by BitTorrent, which rewards users for sharing content by making it download faster.
The complaint states that "Meta intentionally chose to distribute Plaintiffs' movies in order to take advantage of faster download speeds and thereby infringe on other content more quickly." Additionally, the complaint alleges that Meta "was expressly aware of this problem, and a subsequent investigation may reveal that this is precisely why Meta chose to continue distributing the companies' content, rather than merely purchasing a subscription or modifying its BitTorrent client to be used solely for downloads."
The two adult film companies only discovered the alleged copyright infringement after Meta's BitTorrent usage habits were exposed. Previously, several authors had sued Meta for allegedly using their copyrighted works without authorization. In that case, Meta admitted to obtaining content from pirate sources.
As of now, Meta has not commented on the lawsuit.