News-June-22-2026
June 22, 2026 — A California federal judge allowed adult-film producers' copyright claims against Meta to proceed after concluding that the plaintiffs plausibly alleged infringing BitTorrent downloads from Meta-associated IP addresses.[1][2]
Contents
Judge Lets Strike 3 Copyright Claims Against Meta Proceed
U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee denied Meta Platforms, Inc.'s motion to dismiss copyright claims brought by Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, allowing direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement theories to continue at the pleading stage.[1][2] The court held that the alleged BitTorrent copying itself could satisfy the infringement element even without proof at the pleading stage that the films were used to train a particular AI model.[2] The order also rejected Meta's argument that the complaint only described personal downloads by employees or visitors, finding that repeated patterns across corporate IP addresses plausibly supported a coordinated-download inference.[1][2]
The ruling is significant for AI training-data litigation because it lets the plaintiffs proceed on a theory centered on alleged acquisition of copyrighted works through BitTorrent, rather than requiring the complaint to tie each work to a specific model-training run at the motion-to-dismiss stage.[1][2] The case remains at an early procedural stage, and the order does not decide whether Meta actually infringed the plaintiffs' copyrights or whether the plaintiffs can prove AI-training use in discovery.[2]