Strike 3 Holdings Sued Meta. Meta Answered With Your Defense

By Leonard French, Copyright Defense Attorney

Somebody was downloading Ted Lasso. Episode five, then episode two, then episode eight. Out of order.

Nobody watches Ted Lasso out of order.

That detail comes from Exhibit B of a copyright complaint pending in federal court in San Jose, and it sits at the center of the strangest copyright case in America right now: Strike 3 Holdings, LLC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 5:25-cv-06213 (N.D. Cal.). The plaintiff is the most prolific copyright litigant in the history of the federal courts. The defendant is one of the largest companies on Earth. And the defense Meta is running — the argument its lawyers put in front of a federal judge — is the same defense I have spent fifteen years raising for the people Strike 3 usually sues.

If you're reading this because you received a letter from your internet provider about a Strike 3 Holdings subpoena, this case matters to you. Not because it will decide your case — it won't — but because, for the first time, Strike 3's evidence and the standard defenses against it are being tested by a defendant with unlimited resources and no incentive to settle quietly. What happens in San Jose will shape the leverage in every Strike 3 case that follows.

Here's where things stand as of late July 2026, and what it means if you're on the receiving end of one of these cases.

The plaintiff I know very well

Strike 3 Holdings produces adult films under the brands Blacked, Tushy, Vixen, and Deeper. It also runs a litigation operation unlike anything else in the copyright system. By press counts, Strike 3 has filed more than twenty thousand copyright lawsuits in federal court — reportedly more file-sharing suits in some years than every other rightsholder in the country combined.

The model is consistent. A proprietary tracking system called VXN Scan monitors BitTorrent swarms and logs the IP addresses it observes sharing Strike 3's films. Strike 3 sues the IP address as a "John Doe," asks the court for early discovery, subpoenas the internet provider for the subscriber's name, and then opens settlement discussions. Reported settlement figures run from a few hundred dollars per film into the tens of thousands for larger cases. The pressure isn't only financial. Settle quietly, or litigate under your real name, in a public federal docket, attached to a list of the films at issue. For most people that isn't a legal calculation. It's a fear calculation.

Out of those twenty thousand-plus cases, only a handful have ever been genuinely litigated. None has gone to trial.

I have represented more than two thousand people in BitTorrent copyright cases, a great many of them adverse to Strike 3. And I'm hardly the only critic. In 2018, Judge Royce Lamberth of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. called Strike 3 a "copyright troll" whose filings "smack of extortion" — a "high-tech shakedown" treating his court like an ATM. He compared the company to the troll from the Billy Goat Gruff fairy tale: it demands the toll, and at the first sign of a real fight, it cuts and runs back under the bridge.

In 2025, Strike 3 picked a fight with a defendant that does not run.

How Strike 3 found Meta

The trail starts in a different lawsuit. In Kadrey v. Meta, a group of authors sued Meta for training its LLaMA language models on their books. Discovery in that case forced Meta to open its files, and what came out is now part of the public record: Meta torrented at least 81.7 terabytes of material from shadow libraries. It configured six Virtual Private Clouds — rented server space outside its own network — to do the torrenting. Internal discussions described keeping the activity "off-infra" so the traffic couldn't be traced to Meta IP addresses. One employee wrote, in a message that is now a court exhibit: "not sure we can use Meta's IPs to load through torrents pirate content, ahah."

Those admissions concern books — text data for language models. Keep that distinction in mind, because Meta certainly does.

In January 2025, according to its complaint, Strike 3 read the coverage of those revelations and searched its own archive. VXN Scan logs activity across BitTorrent generally, not just Strike 3's own films. Strike 3 says it found forty-seven IP addresses registered to Facebook. It then alleges it identified seven more IP ranges on third-party data centers moving in coordination with the corporate addresses — six of which, it alleges, are the six Virtual Private Clouds from the books case. A seventh range is registered to a purported Hawaii non-profit at a Honolulu street address the plaintiffs say they could not locate. I looked too. I couldn't find it either. That's not an accusation; it's a silence in the record, and I'm stating it as one.

And then one more address: a residential Comcast account in Mountain View, California, allegedly sharing ninety-seven of Strike 3's films in coordination with the rest.

In July 2025, Strike 3 and its affiliate Counterlife Media sued Meta in the Northern District of California, originally over 2,396 works, later amended to 2,973. Every one of those claims is an allegation. Nothing has been proven.

Meta's motion to dismiss: the roommate defense at corporate scale

Meta's response was the part that made me sit up, because I've written this motion. Many times.

Meta argued, in substance: whoever torrented adult films from these IP addresses, it wasn't "Meta." Employees, contractors, even visitors on the network, acting for personal use. The corporation didn't do this. And Meta cited the Ninth Circuit's decision in Cobbler Nevada v. Gonzales — the 2018 case holding that being the subscriber on an internet account, standing alone, does not make you the infringer. A plaintiff needs, in the court's words, "something more."

If you've ever been a Strike 3 defendant, you know this argument. It's the roommate defense. The open Wi-Fi defense. An IP address is not a person. Strike 3 has spent a decade insisting that defense is a dodge. Meta's answer to Strike 3 was, in effect: an IP address is not a corporation, either.

Underneath it sits a doctrine called volitional conduct, which runs back to a 1995 case called Religious Technology Center v. Netcom: direct copyright infringement requires some element of volition or causation, which is missing when a defendant's system is merely used by someone else. The doctrine was built to protect automated intermediaries — internet providers, cloud services — from liability for their users' choices. Meta turned the shield around: the company is the machine, and the humans on its network made their own choices.

The ruling: the pattern was the "something more"

On June 11, 2026, Judge Eumi K. Lee denied Meta's motion to dismiss. Not because Cobbler Nevada is wrong — because Strike 3 pleaded the "something more."

And the something more was the pattern. Ted Lasso episodes, out of order. Clusters of IP addresses pulling files that shared a keyword on the same day. Coordinated switches between Russian-language and Chinese-language file names. Obscure files appearing across supposedly unrelated networks within hours of each other. Humans don't download like that. Humans binge in sequence; humans don't coordinate file names across data centers. An algorithm working through a queue by keyword produces exactly that shape. Judge Lee wrote that it "strains credulity to suggest that these correlations are mere coincidence and the product of individual human selections."

Strike 3's theory isn't that a person at Meta pressed the button. It's that the bot was the employee — an automated system Meta allegedly built, deployed, and centrally directed. On that theory, automation doesn't shield the company. Automation is the volition.

Now the caution, because the press coverage ran hot on this ruling. A motion to dismiss tests only whether the complaint, assumed true, states a plausible claim. "Strains credulity" is an inference drawn in Strike 3's favor under that standard. It is not a finding that Meta did anything. No evidence has been tested. And one more correction, because several outlets blurred it: the judge who called Strike 3 a copyright troll was Judge Lamberth, in 2018, in a different court. Judge Lee said no such thing.

But notice what happened doctrinally. Against one household, one subscriber, one IP address, "an IP address is not a person" is very hard for a plaintiff to answer — which is exactly why the defense works for my clients. Judge Lee's order says the answer can be scale itself. The very thing that made the alleged conduct industrial is what defeated the individual-use argument at the pleading stage.

The answer: thirteen defenses and three admissions

After the ruling, the parties stipulated to an amended complaint, and on July 21, 2026, Meta filed its answer. Mostly denials, as answers are. But three things in it deserve a careful read.

First, paragraphs 105 and 106. That residential Comcast address in Mountain View. Meta admits the subscriber's adult son was a contingent worker at Meta from October 2022 to October 2024 — and then a Meta employee, title Data Engineer, from April 2025 to May 2026. The lawsuit was filed in July 2025. The employment ended in May 2026, mid-litigation. The record says nothing about why, and I won't speculate. Meta denies the residential activity had anything to do with the company. But the admission converts an allegation into a fact: the key residential IP address in the complaint traces to the home of a Meta data engineer.

Second, Meta admits — again — that it downloaded portions of publicly available text datasets by torrenting to train LLaMA, and that it "undertook efforts to avoid distributing" that text data. Books: admitted, with an asterisk about seeding. Films: denied entirely.

Third, Meta pleads thirteen affirmative defenses, and two stand out. The thirteenth is barely a defense at all: Meta states that because it exercised none of the copyright owner's rights, it "does not currently assert any fair use defense," reserving the right. Compare the books case, where Meta admitted the torrenting and made fair use the centerpiece. Here it won't plead the words, because pleading fair use presupposes a use.

The ninth defense is the one I want every Strike 3 defendant to understand.

The defense that cuts both ways

Meta's ninth affirmative defense says that if any uploading occurred in the course of BitTorrent downloading — which Meta denies — it was "de minimis and did not result in the creation of an identifiable or usable copy."

To see what that means, you need one piece of BitTorrent mechanics. The protocol doesn't move films; it moves fragments. A file is shattered into thousands of hashed pieces, each a tiny fraction of the whole, and the protocol is symmetrical by design — as your client verifies a piece, it begins offering that piece to other peers. You cannot take without giving.

Strike 3's evidence model is built on that fact. VXN Scan connects to a target address, downloads pieces of a file, and captures the transaction in packet logs. Those captured fragments are the proof of "distribution" in essentially every mass-BitTorrent case ever filed — including, in all likelihood, yours.

Meta's argument is that a hashed fragment is unwatchable noise: not a film, and not a "copy" within the meaning of the Copyright Act, because a scrambled sliver of data doesn't fix the work in any form a person could perceive. As far as I can tell, no court has ever ruled on that defense in this posture. It's a question of first impression, and it isn't a free shot — the Ninth Circuit held in Bell v. Wilmott Storage Services that once a copyright right is violated, de minimis copying isn't a freestanding excuse. The argument only works as what it really is underneath: a fight about the definition of a copy.

But follow it one step further. If a fragment is not a copy, that argument doesn't just help Meta. It presses on the evidentiary foundation of Strike 3's entire model — the same captured-fragment proof that has produced settlements from thousands of households. Meta's ninth defense, carried to its conclusion, argues against the machinery of the company suing it.

I've been making versions of this point for years. It has never before been made by a defendant that Strike 3 cannot afford to walk away from.

The stakes, stated precisely

The amended complaint covers 2,973 registered works. Statutory damages for copyright infringement run from $750 per work at the minimum, to $30,000 at the ordinary maximum, to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Multiply it out: roughly $2.2 million at the floor, about $89 million at the ordinary ceiling, and $445,950,000 — just under half a billion dollars — at the willful maximum. Those are plaintiff-side ceilings, not estimates, and no serious observer treats the top number as a prediction. But hold the two ends of the picture in one frame: nearly half a billion dollars, sought under the same statute, over the same kinds of films, by a plaintiff that reportedly settles residential cases for $750 apiece. Same law. Same works. Different defendant.

The court has referred the parties to mediation, and trial is set for February 7, 2028. Meta has shown no sign of settling. Judge Lamberth's fairy tale is finally being tested: the troll has met a crosser big enough to fight to the end of the bridge, and for the first time, Strike 3's tracking evidence will face expert challenge and cross-examination at full scale.

What this means if Strike 3 has sued you

Here is the honest, careful version — not the version that oversells.

The Meta ruling does not weaken your defenses. Cobbler Nevada is still the law: a bare IP address, standing alone, still doesn't state a claim against a subscriber. Judge Lee found "something more" in cross-network pattern evidence spanning dozens of coordinated addresses. Against one household with one address, that kind of pattern evidence almost never exists. If anything, the ruling illustrates just how much more a plaintiff needs beyond your name on a Comcast bill.

Meanwhile, the foundations under Strike 3's cases are, for the first time, under real adversarial pressure. Whether BitTorrent fragments are actionable "copies," whether piece-exchange is "distribution" at all — questions courts have side-stepped for nearly two decades — are now squarely presented in litigation Strike 3 cannot quietly dismiss. However those questions resolve, they will change the negotiating landscape in every John Doe case that follows.

None of that means you should ignore a subpoena notice. The letter from your internet provider comes with a deadline, and what you do before that deadline matters: whether to move to quash, whether to negotiate anonymously through counsel, whether the facts of your household support fighting rather than settling. Every case turns on its own facts, and the worst outcomes I see almost always start with someone who did nothing, or who called the plaintiff's lawyers themselves and started talking.

I've defended these cases for almost fifteen years — more than two thousand of them. If you've received a Strike 3 Holdings subpoena notice, a settlement demand, or a complaint, contact me here for a consultation before your deadline runs.