A US judge rejects Meta's bid to dismiss a lawsuit from Strike 3, which owns porn production companies, that alleges Meta torrented its videos for AI training
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta’s AI-training copyright disputes have produced mixed procedural and substantive outcomes. The Kadrey authors’ case was allowed to proceed, while an earlier authors’ suit saw most claims dismissed; a later ruling found Meta’s use of books to train Llama protected by fair use, while criticizing the plaintiffs’ presentation.
The Strike 3 case adds allegations about the means of obtaining training material, rather than only the use of copyrighted works in a model-training pipeline. The refusal to dismiss keeps that factual pathway open for litigation.
First-order effects
- Strike 3 can continue pursuing its claims against Meta, and Meta must continue defending allegations that it acquired the videos through torrenting for AI training.
- The case remains focused on whether the alleged sourcing conduct and subsequent AI-training use create liability; the dismissal ruling does not resolve those claims.
Second-order effects
- Rights holders challenging AI training gain another live case in which the provenance of training data may be as consequential as the fair-use analysis of model training itself.
- AI developers facing copyright claims may face greater pressure to document how datasets were obtained, because defenses available for use of material may not address alleged acquisition conduct.
Third-order effects
- If courts continue to separate questions of data acquisition from questions of transformative use, AI copyright litigation could shift from broad arguments over training toward evidence-heavy disputes over dataset provenance.
- The emerging legal boundary for AI training may turn less on a single universal fair-use answer and more on the combination of source, acquisition method, and the plaintiffs’ evidence.
The trend: AI copyright disputes are increasingly testing not just whether training is lawful, but whether the underlying training corpus was obtained through legally defensible channels.