Porn companies can sue meth for adult movie torrenting, rules decided

A federal judge has rejected Meta’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit alleging it violated copyright law by torrenting pornography to train AI.

On June 11, U.S. District Judge Yumi K. Lee filed an order stating that porn holding companies Strike3 Holdings and Counterlife Media (in which Strike3 holds a majority ownership) “make plausible claims.” [Meta] is responsible for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement based on movie torrents. ”

Strike 3 Holdings, which owns several popular porn sites including Blacked, first filed the lawsuit in July 2025, according to 404 Media. Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media alleged that between 2018 and 2025, Meta downloaded and infringed more than 2,300 copyrighted porn movies to train its AI models. Mehta is said to have used the popular torrent program BitTorrent.

According to the lawsuit, IP addresses traced to Mehta’s offices “consistently operated in a non-human pattern” and “were involved in large-scale breaches beyond the scope of human consumption.” The companies are seeking up to $359 million in damages.

Mehta filed a motion to dismiss the Strike 3 lawsuit in October, denying the claims and saying they were “nonsense and unsupported” and that the porn downloads were for “personal use.” But in his order denying the motion, Lee cited download patterns that included IP addresses torrenting similar files with the same name, from comics to pornography, in a single day. “It would be imprudent to suggest that these correlations are merely coincidental and the product of individual human choices,” Lee wrote.

The lawsuit can now proceed.

Strike 3 and Counterlife Media became aware of Meta’s BitTorrent activity through coverage of the January 2025 lawsuit against Meta. The discovery of this incident revealed that the company was selling pirated copies of AI training books. In June 2025, Meta won the case. However, as Mashable reported at the time, the judge in the case wrote that the plaintiffs could have prevailed had they made a different legal argument, leaving the door open for lawsuits like this one.

Mashable has reached out to Meta for comment.