This week, Meta asked a US district court to toss a lawsuit alleging that the tech giant illegally torrented pornography to train AI.
The move comes after Strike 3 Holdings discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses, as well as other downloads that Meta allegedly concealed using a “stealth network” of 2,500 “hidden IP addresses.” Accusing Meta of stealing porn to secretly train an unannounced adult version of its AI model powering Movie Gen, Strike 3 sought damages that could have exceeded $350 million, TorrentFreak reported.
Filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on Monday, Meta accused Strike 3 of relying on “guesswork and innuendo,” while alleging that Strike 3 “has been labeled by some as a ‘copyright troll’ that files extortive lawsuits.” Requesting that all copyright claims be dropped, Meta argued that there is no evidence that the tech giant directed any of the downloads of about 2,400 adult movies owned by Strike 3—or was even aware of the illegal activity.
Strike 3 also cited “no facts to suggest that Meta has ever trained an AI model on adult images or video, much less intentionally so,” Meta claimed.
“These claims are bogus,” Meta’s spokesperson told Ars.
Meta Argues Downloads Were for “Personal Use”
Notably, the alleged downloads spanned seven years, starting in 2018. That’s about four years before Meta’s AI efforts “researching Multimodal Models and Generative Video” began, making it implausible the downloads were intended for AI training, Meta claims. An even more “glaring” defect, Meta claims, is that Meta’s terms prohibit generating adult content, “contradicting the premise that such materials might even be useful for Meta’s AI training.”
Instead, Meta claims, available evidence “is plainly indicative” that the flagged adult content was torrented for “private personal use”—since the small amount linked to Meta IP addresses and employees represented only “a few dozen titles per year intermittently obtained one file at a time.”
“The far more plausible inference to be drawn from such meager, uncoordinated activity is that disparate individuals downloaded adult videos for personal use,” Meta’s filing says.
For example, unlike lawsuits raised by book authors whose works are part of an enormous dataset used to train AI, the activity on Meta’s corporate IP addresses allegedly only amounted to about 22 downloads per year. That is nowhere near the “concerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,” Meta claims.
Further, that alleged activity can’t even reliably be linked to any Meta employee, Meta claims.
Strike 3 “does not identify any of the individuals who supposedly used these Meta IP addresses, allege that any were employed by Meta or had any role in AI training at Meta, or specify whether (and which) content allegedly downloaded was used to train any particular Meta model,” Meta wrote.
Meanwhile, “tens of thousands of employees,” as well as “innumerable contractors, visitors, and third parties access the internet at Meta every day,” Meta argued. So while it’s “possible one or more Meta employees” downloaded Strike 3’s content over the past seven years, “it is just as possible” that a “guest, or freeloader,” or “contractor, or vendor, or repair person—or any combination of such persons—was responsible for that activity,” Meta claims.
Other alleged activity included a claim that a Meta contractor was directed to download adult content at his father’s house, but those downloads, too, “are plainly indicative of personal consumption,” Meta argued. That contractor worked as an “automation engineer,” Meta noted, with no apparent basis provided for why he would be expected to source AI training data in that role. “No facts plausibly” tie “Meta to those downloads,” Meta claims.
“The fact that the torrenting allegedly stopped when his contract with Meta ended says nothing about whether the alleged torrenting was performed with Meta’s knowledge or at its direction,” Meta wrote.
Meta Slams AI Training Theory as “Nonsensical”
Possibly most baffling to Meta in Strike 3’s complaint, however, is the claim about the “stealth network” of hidden IPs. This presents “yet another conundrum” that Strike 3 “fails to address,” Meta claims, writing, “why would Meta seek to ‘conceal’ certain alleged downloads of Plaintiffs’ and third-party content, but use easily traceable Meta corporate IP addresses for many hundreds of others?”
“The obvious answer is that it would not do so,” Meta claims, slamming Strike 3’s “entire AI training theory” as “nonsensical and unsupported.”
Finally, Meta noted that Strike 3 cannot claim that Meta should have been better at “policing” its network for illegal activity. “Monitoring every file downloaded by any person using Meta’s global network would be an extraordinarily complex and invasive undertaking,” Meta claims, citing precedent that only requires Meta employ a “simple measure” to monitor such activity.
Meta is hoping the court will agree that Strike 3 failed to prove Meta had anything to do with the alleged illegal downloads. Strike 3 has two weeks to respond, TorrentFreak reported.
For Meta, defeating the lawsuit is not just a matter of avoiding damages but also defending its commitment to ensuring its AI video tools don’t generate explicit content that’s increasingly regulated. In the filing, Meta claims that Strike 3 provided no evidence that Meta trained AI on its content, because “there was none.”
“We don’t want this type of content, and we take deliberate steps to avoid training on this kind of material,” Meta’s spokesperson told Ars.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
