Meta's argument that its corporate IP addresses downloaded thousands of adult films for "personal use" didn't survive its first courtroom test.
U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee denied Meta's motion to dismiss a copyright lawsuit from Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media on June 11. The companies allege Meta used BitTorrent to download more than 2,300 pornographic films between 2018 and 2025, with activity traced to Meta's corporate IP addresses. The judge found the behavior — mass downloads of similarly named files spanning cartoons and adult content, all in a single day, at patterns "beyond what a human could consume" — implausible as anything but automated scraping. Strike 3 and Counterlife, which together operate several adult content sites, are seeking up to $359 million in damages.
The lawsuit reached this point partly because of Meta's earlier copyright fight over pirated books: discovery in that case revealed the company had downloaded training data through BitTorrent at scale, and the books-case judge noted the plaintiffs might have prevailed with different legal arguments — a gap Strike 3's lawyers appear to have studied carefully. That earlier case, which Meta won in June 2025, now looks less like a clean vindication and more like a procedural roadmap for the next plaintiff.
Meta called the original claims "nonsensical and unsupported" — a defense that held up less well than its own IP address logs.