Two adult film companies are suing Meta, claiming the tech giant illegally downloaded over 2,000 adult movies to train its artificial intelligence.
Adult film producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media say Meta “willfully and intentionally” infringed at least 2,396 copyrighted movies since 2018, according to the lawsuit filed in California on Friday.
The two production companies are seeking extensive damages that could total $359 million.
Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant, or party involved in a lawsuit, in all of the United States, according to TorrentFreak. The company largely targets individual BitTorrent pirates who take movies and share them online for free.
The case against Meta also revolves around unauthorized BitTorrent, which is a way to download and share files from the Internet.
The lawsuit claims Meta knowingly downloaded the movies “from pirate sources for purposes of acquiring content to train its Meta Movie Gen, Large Language Model (“LLaMA”), as well as various other Meta AI Models that rely on video training content.”
The companies accuse Meta of trying to capitalize on BitTorrent transfers’ “tit-for-tat” algorithm, which rewards users for sharing content with others by making their download speeds faster.
“Meta made the deliberate choice to seed Plaintiffs’ motion pictures in order to capitalize on faster download speeds so it could infringe other content faster,” the complaint says.
The complaint goes on to allege that Meta “was specifically aware of this issue and, discovery will likely show, is the reason why [Meta] elected to continuously distribute [the companies’] content as opposed to just purchasing a subscription or modifying its BitTorrent clients to download only.”
The adult film companies discovered the alleged copyright infringements after Meta’s BitTorrent habit was publicized in a lawsuit filed by several authors accusing the tech giant of using their copyrighted work without permission.
In that case, Meta admitted it obtained content from pirate sources, according to TorrentFreak.
Meta has not commented on the lawsuit. The Independent has reached out to the company for comment.
