Lawsuit: Meta may have seeded porn to minors while hiding piracy for AI training:
Porn sites may have blown up Meta's key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries" to train its AI models.
Meta has defeated most of the authors' claims and claimed there is no proof that Meta ever uploaded pirated data through seeding or leeching on the BitTorrent network used to download training data. But authors still have a chance to prove that Meta may have profited off its massive piracy, and a new lawsuit filed by adult sites last week appears to contain evidence that could help authors win their fight, TorrentFreak reported.
The new lawsuit was filed last Friday in a US district court in California by Strike 3 Holdings—which says it attracts "over 25 million monthly visitors" to sites that serve as "ethical sources" for adult videos that "are famous for redefining adult content with Hollywood style and quality."
After authors revealed Meta's torrenting, Strike 3 Holdings checked its proprietary BitTorrent-tracking tools designed to detect infringement of its videos and alleged that the company found evidence that Meta has been torrenting and seeding its copyrighted content for years—since at least 2018. Some of the IP addresses were clearly registered to Meta, while others appeared to be "hidden," and at least one was linked to a Meta employee, the filing said.
According to Strike 3 Holdings, Meta "willfully and intentionally" infringed "at least 2,396 movies" as part of a strategy to download terabytes of data as fast as possible by seeding popular high-quality porn. Supposedly, Meta continued seeding the content "sometimes for days, weeks, or even months" after downloading them, and these movies may also have been secretly used to train Meta's AI models, Strike 3 Holdings alleged.
The porn site operator explained to the court that BitTorrent's protocol establishes a "tit-for-tat" mechanism that "rewards users who distribute the most desired content." It alleged that Meta took advantage of this system by "often" pirating adult videos that are "often within the most infringed files on BitTorrent websites" on "the very same day the motion pictures are released."
These tactics allegedly gave Meta several advantages, making it harder for Strike 3 Holdings' sites to compete, including potentially distributing the videos to minors for free without age checks in states that now require them.
"Meta specifically targeted Plaintiffs' content for distribution in order to accelerate its downloads of vast amounts of other content," the lawsuit said. And while Meta claimed that it "wrote a script to intentionally limit distributing popular books on BitTorrent," Strike 3 Holdings believes "discovery will likely show" Meta "continuously" distributed its adult videos specifically as a strategy to get around the BitTorrent protocol.
So far, Strike 3 Holdings says it has documented at least five episodes in which Meta "hand-picked" adult videos from a specific site for "intense periods of distribution" to avoid seeding other content it was sourcing through BitTorrent.
"The only reason to incur the server and bandwidth expense of remaining in a swarm for these long durations is to leverage the extended distribution as tit-for-tat currency in order to efficiently download millions of other files from BitTorrent," Strike 3 Holdings alleged.
[...] Asked for comment on the lawsuit, a Meta spokesperson told Ars, "We're reviewing the complaint, but don't believe Strike's claims are accurate."
[...] Meta also allegedly attempted to "conceal its BitTorrent activities" through "six Virtual Private Clouds" that formed a "stealth network" of "hidden IP addresses," the lawsuit alleged, which seemingly implicated a "major third-party data center provider" as a partner in Meta's piracy.
An analysis of these IP addresses allegedly found "data patterns that matched infringement patterns seen on Meta's corporate IP Addresses" and included "evidence of other activity on the BitTorrent network including ebooks, movies, television shows, music, and software." The seemingly non-human patterns documented on both sets of IP addresses suggest the data was for AI training and not for personal use, Strike 3 Holdings alleged.
Perhaps most shockingly, considering that a Meta employee joked "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right," Strike 3 Holdings further alleged that it found "at least one residential IP address of a Meta employee" infringing its copyrighted works. That suggests Meta may have directed an employee to torrent pirated data outside the office to obscure the data trail.
Related Stories
Bruce Schneier, the cryptographer and privacy specialist, and J B Branch, an accountability advocate at Public Citizen, have written a post about AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge. They raise hard questions about what happened to Aaron Swartz in the context of the what is going on with artificial intelligence, copyright, and ultimately the control of knowledge:
As AI becomes a larger part of America's economy, one can see the writing on the wall. Judges will twist themselves into knots to justify an innovative technology premised on literally stealing the works of artists, poets, musicians, all of academia and the internet, and vast expanses of literature. But if Swartz's actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies?
The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.
The stakes extend beyond copyright law or past injustices. They concern who controls the infrastructure of knowledge going forward and what that control means for democratic participation, accountability and public trust.
The questions they raise are important questions because the foundation of democracy is being able to make informed decisions through participation in civilized, well-rounded discussions. The prerequisite for that is knowledge.
Previously:
(2025) OpenAI Desperate to Avoid Explaining Why It Deleted Pirated Book Datasets
(2025) Meta Pirated and Seeded Porn for Years to Train AI, Lawsuit Says
(2025) Creating AI Based Entirely on Ethically-Sourced Data
(2025) Copyright Office Thinks AI Companies Sometimes Stole Content
(2024) OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead in San Francisco Apartment
(2024) OpenAI Blamed NYT for Tech Problem Erasing Evidence of Copyright Abuse
(2024) AI Companies Are Finally Being Forced To Cough Up For Training Data
and more ...
(Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Thursday July 31 2025, @09:35PM (5 children)
So is this what Meta does at its new super secret AI-lab? Downloading porn, "for the AI". But it is not only porn. It's some sort of fancy ethically sourced deluxe interracial porn. Non of that normal lowbrow tits and arse stuff. I thought Zuck was down for the white cause now with his new maga-friends. Not watching large black cocks in tiny white holes. I guess we pegged what Mark secretly desire ...
So what did the AI learn from all those terabytes of porn? Beyond fucking with humanity ...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Thursday July 31 2025, @11:02PM
The exact date the invention of the razor became ubiquitous.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sgleysti on Friday August 01 2025, @01:19AM (3 children)
It sounds like they seeded (shared) the porn with the pirating public to get credits that they used to download material (mostly books???) for training their AI.
This tracks my perception of reality really well. Meta had to share files that people want (porn) in order to download files that Meta wanted (books) but most people don't.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday August 01 2025, @01:48AM (1 child)
That's not a new strategy. More than ten years ago, I knew several otaku and nime friki who did exactly the same to get their volumes of manga and anime.
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Friday August 01 2025, @05:14PM
Amusing. I have to respect the hustle.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mrpg on Friday August 01 2025, @09:43PM
Ok, if they needed that then it was in private trackers.