LOS ANGELES—Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, asked a federal district court on Monday to dismiss a complaint from Strike 3 Holdings, the parent company of Vixen Media Group (VMG), that was filed in July of this year.
According to AVN’s previous reporting on the lawsuit, Strike 3 accused Meta of copyright infringement, alleging that the social media giant downloaded and distributed its movies through an online piracy website for the training of artificial intelligence models. Meta released its artificial intelligence assistant app earlier this year.
Attorneys for Strike 3 initially requested that the court award over $350 million, citing $150,000 per statutory violation across nearly 2,400 copyrighted materials. In the initial complaint, Strike 3 alleges that the tech giant controlled by Mark Zuckerberg deployed a “stealth network” of 2,500 hidden IP addresses to steal VMG works.
This was done, according to Strike 3’s accusations, to train an “adult-friendly” model of Meta’s popular Movie Gen artificial intelligence video generation tool. Following these accusations, Meta responded in the recent motion to dismiss, stating that Strike 3 failed to present a viable case and that it was nothing but a “copyright troll.”
“The complaint fails to state facts sufficient to state a claim against Meta for direct, vicarious, or contributory copyright liability,” argues attorney Angela L. Dunning, a partner at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in Palo Alto, California.
“And these claims fail not only for lack of supporting facts, but also because Plaintiffs’ theory of liability makes no sense and cannot be reconciled with the facts they do plead. The entire complaint against Meta should be dismissed with prejudice,” Dunning adds. Much of the motion to dismiss presents Strike 3’s claims as baseless.
Central to the initial complaint is that Strike 3 tracked the illegal downloads to IP addresses owned by Meta. Nevertheless, Meta shifted the allegations made by Strike 3, which stated that these copyrighted works were used for AI model training, to the claim that these were downloads for “private personal use.” Dunning argues in the filing, “The far more plausible inference to be drawn from such meager, uncoordinated activity is that disparate individuals downloaded adult videos for personal use.”
Per Ars Technica, citing Meta’s motion to dismiss, 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.”
In previous AVN reporting, it is noted that Strike 3 often tracks illegal downloads via IP infringement mitigation technology. Strike 3’s agents allegedly traced thousands of instances of illicit downloads. VMG and Strike 3 initially alleged, “No human being has the capacity to download and consume as much content as Meta infringed.”
