IN TWO OF THE LAST THREE YEARS, an adult filmmaker marked Valentine’s Day by filing dozens of federal copyright lawsuits against Bay Area individuals suspected of illegally downloading its adult films.
This year Valentine’s Day has fallen on a weekend, so another batch of filings on Feb. 14 was not in the cards, but it remains a good time to review the filmmaker’s ongoing portfolio of Bay Area litigation.
The last year has borne witness to two big developments.
First, the Bay Area has lost its longtime position as the number one hot spot in the country for federal copyright litigation over illegal downloads of porn videos.
Second, this year Strike 3 Holdings LLC, the filmmaker and serial litigant who that has filed tens of thousands of individual suits, decided to go after a bigger fish, perhaps the biggest fish of all — Meta Platforms Inc., the owner of Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, asserting that Meta illegally downloaded its films to train its generative artificial intelligence models.
A legacy of litigation; controversial but lucrative
Strike 3, owner of the rights to countless videos marketed on its adult websites — Blacked, Tushy, Vixen, Tushy Raw, Blacked Raw, Milfy, Wifey, and Slayed — is the national leader in filing lawsuits for copyright infringement of adult films.
The lawsuits are controversial in part because when Strike 3 sues, it rarely knows the actual person it is suing. Virtually every lawsuit is against the same hapless “John Doe,” the name followed by a string of numbers representing an internet or IP address.
Strike 3 has come up with technology that it contends allows it to identify the IP address for many infringers who download its films using BitTorrent technology. The problem, and part of what makes the suits controversial, is that knowing the IP address where an illegal download occurred does not translate to knowing the identity of the person who did the downloading.
In Strike 3’s typical case, when it identifies a group of illegal downloads, it brings a federal lawsuit against John Doe further identified by his related IP address.
Virtually the first thing that Strike 3 files is a motion asking the court to allow it to direct a subpoena to the Internet Service Provider — such as Verizon or Comcast — that hosts that particular IP address, and asks for the name and address of the customer at the identified IP address.
That request is routinely granted, and Strike 3 then sends out the subpoena. The ISP generally doesn’t respond immediately. First, it sends a notice to its customer — the actual person that pays for that IP address, the one Strike 3 only knows as John Doe — and says it has received the subpoena and plans to respond unless Doe takes action in the litigation.
John Doe is now faced with a federal suit that could ultimately identify him as an illegal downloader of adult materials, something he may not want to be made public. Moreover, Strike 3 demands $150,000 in its initial filing, because the copyright law provides that damages could be that much in the case of intentional illegal downloads.
John Does may not know that the judges in the Bay Area rarely allow the real name to be used in the litigation, or that most cases are resolved for far less than the Strike 3’s demand, but the filing is likely to get their attention.
Attorney Steve Vondran of San Francisco has defended hundreds of these cases. He says that most cases result in settlements — he sometimes refers to them as “strong arm settlements” — noting that some of his clients are people “who largely had no idea they were violating any laws.”
Settlements vary in amount depending on a number of factors, including the number of films downloaded. In 2024, Vondran put the settlement range between $8,000 and $12,000, and said Thursday that “settlement amounts remain consistent” this year.
Vondran thinks Strike 3 tries to be fair and to design settlement amounts “to be reasonable for client[s].” He adds however, that “the financial hits really hurt people that are saving for homes, trying to send their kids to school, etc.”
The cases are rarely aggressively defended.
There are defenses — the owner of an IP address where there has been an illegal download isn’t necessarily the downloader. Some routers aren’t password protected and can be used by anyone in range. In some locations, many people have access to the router’s password.
But federal litigation is expensive and Vondran says that when there is pushback by a defendant, Strike 3 usually adds additional evidence intended to show that Doe was in fact the downloader.
Of the 15 cases that Strike 3 filed in the Bay Area on Valentine’s Day in 2025, all were closed within a year, according to court records, and the average time the cases were open was less than five months — rocket speed for federal litigation.
The business of litigating
The lawsuits are big business. According to an analysis by Bay City News, Strike 3 has filed a whopping 20,825 federal lawsuits for infringement around the country since 2017. If even half of those claims settled in the range that Vondran sees, Strike 3 has recovered more than $100 million.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the federal court that hears litigation from the Bay Area, has been home to 1,719 of those cases, and until this year was the national leader. That dubious honor now goes to the Eastern District of New York (the counties of Kings, Nassau, Queens, Richmond, and Suffolk).
But that is not to say that the Bay Area has fallen completely off the map.
New filings in the Bay Area in 2025 dipped slightly, with 231 compared to 246 in 2024 and 239 in 2023, but far behind the 422 filings in the Eastern District of New York and the 385 in the Central District of California (the district that includes Los Angeles).
In one respect, the Bay Area remains on top. If the population of the top districts for new Strike 3 filings are estimated based on 2020 Census data, the number of filings per 100,000 residents are 21.05 for the Bay Area, compared to 20.82 for the Eastern District of New York.
In any event, Strike 3’s business model remains robust; in 2025 it filed 4,088 new cases nationally, more than its filings in any preceding year.
Meta
But Strike 3’s year as a porn litigant in 2025 was wildly different from the past in one respect. In addition to fishing for individuals who allegedly downloaded Strike 3’s porn titles, the company is trying to harpoon a whale.
On July 23, 2025, Strike 3 and its affiliate, Counterlife Media LLC, sued Meta, alleging that the social media giant had allegedly infringed at least 2,396 movies owned by the plaintiffs, not for a corporate porn party, but to train its AI models to generate videos.
The suit was quite a change of pace. In its typical case, Strike 3 asserts a claim for $150,000; in this one, it said it was entitled to recover $350 million.
Strike 3 filed the case in federal court in the Bay Area and it was assigned to U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee, sitting in San Jose. Meta has called in a team of lawyers from the Palo Alto office of the Wall Street powerhouse Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Strike 3 is represented by several of the lawyers who frequently appear for it in its regular litigation.
The case remains in its early stages.
On Oct. 27, 2025, Meta moved to dismiss the case without a trial or even discovery — the process by which the parties exchange documents and take depositions to better understand each other’s positions.
In order to survive a motion to dismiss, a plaintiff has to convince the judge that if the factual allegations in its court filing are accepted to be true, it is at least “plausible” that they establish a valid legal claim.
Strike 3’s filing said that it has found evidence that 157 of its videos were improperly downloaded to 47 Internet addresses allegedly owned by Meta, the implication being that Meta was responsible for the downloading.
In addition, Strike 3 identified 2,560 IP addresses in the name of non-Meta third parties that Strike 3 believes downloaded content on behalf of Meta, based on alleged correlations in data patterns between the Meta addresses and the non-Meta addresses.
Strike 3 builds out its allegations, at least in part, based on information from another AI copyright infringement litigation pending in the Bay Area.
In Kadrey v. Meta, Meta allegedly admitted that in order to train its large language models, it used BitTorrent protocols to copy books without the permission of the authors. Strike 3 extrapolates from the information in that case to plead that something similar happened with its adult titles. (In the Kadrey case, Meta argued that its copying was permissible under the “fair use” copyright defense.)
In moving to dismiss, Meta leaned hard into the gap between the identification of an IP address and the identity of an illegal downloader. It argued that “plausibility” is more than just a “possibility,” and it said that in a corporate context, the gap between Meta’s IP addresses and the potentially thousands of employees and contractors that may have been at its facility during the multi-year time period is enormous.
Given the relatively small number of downloads from the Meta address, Meta asserts that these were most likely downloads for “personal consumption” by individuals, not a coordinated program to train AI models. And for the non-Meta addresses, Meta’s lawyers argue that Strike 3 has put forth only speculation, not facts that will support a plausible claim.
The parties argued their respective positions to the judge on Wednesday. Lee took the matter under advisement and said she would advise the parties of her position in due course.
While her decision is not yet announced, it is customary that even if she rules against Strike 3, she will give the company an opportunity to amend its complaint to bring forward additional information to add meat to the bones of its complaint and make its contention sufficient plausible to move to the discovery phase of the case.