The high-stakes lawsuit between adult content producers and tech giant Meta over the alleged downloads of copyright-infringing videos is heating up. In a new filing, Strike 3 claims that a Meta employee allegedly deleted over 9 terabytes of torrented files. Meta notes that this claim, which originates from an unrelated case, is mischaracterized and irrelevant. Regardless of the outcome of these and other ongoing discovery disputes, both parties aim for a trial in 2028.
In July 2025, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta.
The complaint accused the tech company of using adult films to assist its AI model training. Similar claims have been made by other rightsholders, including many book authors.
This latest case, with over 350 million dollars in potential damages, specifically focuses on Meta’s BitTorrent activity that was recorded in detail through proprietary torrent tracking software. That’s no surprise, as plaintiff Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the United States, known for targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates based on similar evidence.
Meta responded in October by filing a motion to dismiss, arguing the sporadic downloads were consistent with ordinary ‘personal use’ by employees and visitors on the corporate network. It was certainly not a coordinated AI training effort, Meta countered.
‘Meta Employee Deleted 9TB of Torrented Files’
The motion to dismiss remains pending and, meanwhile, the case is heating up in other areas. Last week, the parties filed their joint discovery plan, which Strike 3 used to raise a rather eye-popping allegation.
Meta said that it prefers to delay written evidence discovery requests in this case until the court ruled on its motion to dismiss. However, Strike 3 would like to start gathering evidence right away, fearing that key data may otherwise disappear.
Strike 3’s legal team points out that, at a February 5 hearing in the unrelated Kadrey v. Meta book-authors case, lawyers revealed that a Meta employee had recently deleted over nine terabytes of torrented files. Fearing more deletions, Strike 3 asks the court to allow discovery in the present case to begin immediately.
“Because of the tangible risk that relevant evidence may be deleted by Meta’s employees, Plaintiffs respectfully request that they be allowed to conduct discovery immediately,” the plaintiffs write.
In the same filing, Meta’s legal team immediately tried to defuse the deletion claim. Meta says that no data was spoiled and clarified that it will preserve all evidence as it is legally obliged to do.
“Plaintiffs mischaracterize the Kadrey record. There was no spoliation in Kadrey, which is an unrelated case, and in any event Meta has an appropriate hold in place and is abiding by its preservation obligations,” Meta writes.
Torrent Evidence
The discovery plan also provides the clearest picture yet of what Strike 3 actually wants to find. Among the targets is Meta’s Machine Learning Hub “ML Hub,” including downloaded digital media files, torrenting-related metadata, and labeling data for content acquired from BitTorrent.
Strike 3 also wants logs of Meta servers communicating over “PySpark or Fairspark protocols,” suggesting it believes these tools were used to coordinate downloads across Meta’s infrastructure. Separately, the company is seeking records tying Meta’s alleged hidden “off-infra” IP addresses to Amazon Web Services instances.
The discovery list is broad by design, and the above are just a few examples. In essence, Strike 3 wants all policies, directives, and algorithms related to torrenting. They hope that this information will help to back up their copyright infringement claims.
Meta’s Defense & Trial Date
While Strike 3 references thousands of downloads, Meta stresses that the complaint only mentions 157 downloads from Meta’s corporate IP addresses over seven years. They note that this is illustrative of personal use, rather than an organized data collection effort.
Meta also explains that the alleged downloads began years before it started researching generative video AI, making a coordinated training effort even more implausible. In addition, Meta says that Strike 3 has “no facts whatsoever” linking it to the thousands of additional third-party IP addresses that are named in the complaint.
While Meta’s motion to dismiss is still unresolved, both parties are also looking ahead. While they differ on the exact timing of various deadlines, both believe that an eventual trial can take place in the first half of 2028, if it gets to that.
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A copy of the parties’ 26(f) discovery plan, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf). We will add a copy of the transcript as soon as we notice that it is publicly posted.
Source: 
TorrentFreak.com
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