Ed. note: This report was updated with different numbers for penalties sought. Law.com's original number of $100 billion is disputed by Strike 3; the company is actually demanding $350 million in its complaint, per court filings.
LOS ANGELES—Strike 3 Holdings, the parent company of Vixen Media Group (VMG), is suing Meta Platforms for a whopping $350 million, according to the case docket. Torrent Freak reports that this sum is derived from at least $150,000 per statutory violation that Strike 3 alleges.
Law.com reported a sum of $100 billion but that sum is disputed by Strike 3.
Meta is the parent company of social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Threads and messaging app WhatsApp.
Strike 3 filed a federal lawsuit before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Wednesday of this week.
The complaint levels a $359 million copyright infringement claim against Meta, alleging that the social media giant downloaded and distributed its movies through online piracy websites for the training of artificial intelligence models. Meta released its artificial intelligence assistant app at the end of April.
Strike 3 explains in its suit that it was able to track illegal downloads via a technology it uses for such. The company traced thousands of instances of illegal downloads to dozens of IP addresses belonging to systems attached to Facebook, Meta's flagship platform that was founded by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg.
“No human being has the capacity to download and consume as much content as Meta infringed,” the suit alleges. It additionally claims that Meta infringed on 2,396 of its copyrighted adult movies, downloading them from piracy platforms, and re-distributing them through BitTorrent protocols for torrenting purposes.
Strike 3 said that it believes that Meta Platforms "hand-picked" its movies and engaged in so-called "distribution swarms," in an effort to "leverage the extended distribution as tit-for-tat currency in order to efficiently download millions of other files from BitTorrent."
“[Well] over 100,000 unauthorized distribution transactions of plaintiffs’ works by defendant" were detected by the tracking technology Strike 3 uses, the suit says.
Strike 3 is prolific in its copyright infringement suits. Torrent Freak reports that the company was linked to over 3,900 lawsuits filed in 2024 alone.