SAN FRANCISCO—A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled Thursday that the parent company of the social media network Facebook must face allegations made in a lawsuit filed by Vixen Media Group's parent company, Strike 3 Holdings, accusing the Mark Zuckerberg-owned enterprises of pirating protected Vixen content to train generative artificial intelligence models.
VMG accused Meta Platforms of training Meta's artificial intelligence models using VMG's features and scenes from its deep catalog, alleging that the infringed content was pirated by Meta, which vehemently denies any wrongdoing in the matter, as AVN previously reported.
In February, AVN also reported that the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee, was unlikely to grant a motion to dismiss that Meta filed in October 2025.
The AVN Award-winning adult powerhouse claims more than $350 million in damages arising from this breach.
According to court documents, Meta used the torrenting application BitTorrent to pirate thousands of copyrighted works owned by Strike 3 and Vixen. One of the defenses Meta made was that the content was pirated for personal uses only, but Judge Lee was not convinced. VMG noted that Meta infringed on 2,400 copyrighted works by using algorithmic, non-human download patterns indicative of AI model training.
"[The] plaintiffs have therefore sufficiently alleged that [the] defendant engaged in a coordinated effort to gather data through BitTorrent, including by torrenting plaintiffs’ films,” Judge Lee wrote addressing the effectiveness of the plaintiff's case. Lee also said that the alleged piracy resulted from actions "authorized, ordered, or performed" by Meta, per Strike 3's claims.
