SAN FRANCISCO—The parent company of Vixen Media Group, Strike 3 Holdings, has put Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms on the defensive, with the social media giant attempting to shift blame to a former data engineer it employed as its next tactic in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed last summer.
New developments in the case stem from filings made by the attorneys representing Meta last week, news outlet Torrent Freak reports.
AVN reported in July 2025 that Strike 3 and Vixen Media Group (VMG) leveled a complaint against Meta valued at over $359 million in copyright infringement. VMG alleges that Meta downloaded and distributed its movies through online piracy websites for the training of artificial intelligence models it packages for video and image production.
AVN also reported that Meta's efforts to dismiss the lawsuit were denied by the court and that VMG has ample legal grounds to bring this particular case. After a year of litigation, counsel for VMG filed an amended complaint with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on July 7.
The amended complaint from VMG, submitted to the Biden-appointed federal district judge Eumi K. Lee, opens by stating that "[this] is a case about the ongoing, wholesale copyright infringement of plaintiffs’ motion pictures by defendant." VMG has submitted 2,973 claims of copyright infringement to the court, up from the initial number of 2,396.
"Meta infringed 2,973 of plaintiffs’ works," Vixen's attorneys argue in the amended complaint. "All of these works have been registered with the United States Copyright Office."
The amended complaint further explains, "[Meta] infringed [on the] plaintiffs’ works multiple times from multiple locations." VMG added that it detected illegal downloads through the torrenting platform BitTorrent and discovered that hundreds of the internet protocol (IP) addresses that conducted these downloads were tied to workstations and systems owned by Meta Platforms.
Another IP address was tied to an employee's residential address. Ironically, as a part of its defense, Meta's attorneys confirmed that allegation, noting that the torrenting occurred through devices connected to internet service that belonged to the parent of a Meta employee working as a "data engineer." Meta did this in a response to the amended complaint that was filed with Judge Lee's court last week. Meta denies the allegation, despite detection by VMG's proprietary tools used to detect content and copyright theft.
Those tools are called "VXN Scan" and "Cross Reference Tool." "On information and belief, Meta is also using [the] plaintiffs’ content to train its AI models, knowing that such models will eventually create identical content for little to no cost," VMG alleges in the amended complaint. "This will effectively eliminate [the] plaintiffs’ future ability to compete in the marketplace. ... [No] human being has the capacity to download and consume as much content as Meta infringed."
"Repeated training on plaintiffs’ works is likely to provide Meta’s AI programs with unique advantages compared to other companies who complied with copyright laws, resisting the temptation to acquire free content," attorneys for VMG added.
Meta's lawyers responded in their
affirmative defenses via the most recent filing: "Plaintiffs’ claims are barred under the doctrines of copyright misuse and unclean hands to the extent that plaintiffs’ asserted works quote from, copy, or otherwise incorporate works of others without permission."
Both Meta and VMG have requested a jury trial to resolve the complaint.
