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Edmontosaurus annectens, a large herbivore duck-billed dinosaur that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, was discovered back in 1908 in east-central Wyoming by C.H. Sternberg, a fossil collector. The skeleton, later housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and nicknamed the “AMNH mummy,” was covered by scaly skin imprinted in the surrounding sediment that gave us the first approximate idea of what the animal looked like.

More than a century later, a team of paleontologists led by Paul C. Sereno, a professor of organismal biology at the University of Chicago, got back to the same exact place where Sternberg dug up the first Edmontosaurus specimen. The researchers found two more Edmontosaurus mummies with all fleshy external anatomy imprinted in a sub-millimeter layer of clay. For the first time, we uncovered an accurate image of what Edmontosaurus really looked like, down to the tiniest details, like the size of its scales and the arrangement of spikes on its tail. And we were in for at least a few surprises.

Evolving images

Our view of Edmontosaurus changed over time, even before Sereno’s study. The initial drawing of Edmontosaurus was made in 1909 by Charles R. Knight, a famous paleoartist, who based his visualization on the first specimen found by Sternberg. “He was accurate in some ways, but he made a mistake in that he drew the crest extending throughout the entire length of the body,” Sereno says. The mummy Knight based his drawing on had no tail, so understandably, the artist used his imagination to fill in the gaps and made the Edmontosaurus look a little bit like a dragon.

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Samsung nutzt die durch KI-Rechenzentren ausgelöste Verknappung am Markt für drastische Preiserhöhungen. Kunden berichten von Panikkäufen. (DDR5, Samsung)

Von Chatbots generierte Texte zeichnen sich durch typografische Eigenarten aus. Doch diese sind nicht ohne Weiteres zu unterdrücken. (ChatGPT, KI)

In July, 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 specifically focuses on Meta’s BitTorrent activity. 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.

Meta Wants Lawsuit Dismissed

In late October, Meta responded to the allegations by filing a motion to dismiss at a California federal court. Taking a page from the BitTorrent piracy defense playbook, Meta argues that the IP address evidence presented by the plaintiffs is meaningless without context.

The porn producers had linked numerous Meta IP addresses to unauthorized sharing activity. According to Meta, however, there is no evidence that the alleged activity on its corporate network was centrally orchestrated by the company. In fact, it countered that many alleged downloads predate Meta’s AI training activity.

In addition to denying the allegations, the tech company offered an alternative explanation. Meta suggested that employees or visitors may have downloaded the pirated videos for personal use.

“[T]he small number of downloads—roughly 22 per year on average across dozens of Meta IP addresses—is plainly indicative of private personal use, not a concerted effort to collect the massive datasets Plaintiffs allege are necessary for effective AI training,” Meta wrote.

Porn Producers Counter Personal Use Defense

The plaintiffs responded to Meta’s defense this week, characterizing the “personal use” explanation as implausible, given the amount of data involved and the piracy patterns they observed.

“Plaintiffs provide data demonstrating unique patterns of Meta’s piracy suggestive of a centralized algorithm coordinating the infringements. Meta’s excuse that employees must be infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrights for ‘personal use’ does not fit the facts,” they write.

The rightsholders point out several download patterns that they believe suggest non-human involvement. Interestingly, these patterns are not linked to their own works, but to those of other rightsholders.

For example, they highlight data from June 29, 2024, suggesting that Meta’s corporate, residential, and “hidden” IP addresses all downloaded multiple different versions of Microsoft Office within hours of each other.

“No reasonable person needs this many versions of a word processing software,” they write.

Additionally, the rebuttal mentions that on April 7, 2024, various IP addresses downloaded content linked to the word “origin”, without any other obvious connection. This includes Dan Brown’s book “Origin” the game “Origin Offline Start,” and the 2023 movie “Origin”.

“This is the kind of systematic, hyper-literal search consistent with an algorithm, and not just a person casually searching for files,” the adult companies note. They suggest that downloading data for AI training, as Meta previously admitted in the books lawsuit, is the ultimate goal.

The “Tit-for-Tat” Motive

The rightsholders also offer a secondary motive to explain why Meta might want to use its videos as part of the broader AI training scheme. They suggest that the tech giant allegedly used popular adult films as ‘BitTorrent currency’.

The companies allege that these downloads would benefit BitTorrent’s reciprocal “tit-for-tat” mechanism. They previously explained in their complaint that this could boost Meta’s other download efforts.

“Meta does not produce popular creative works and thus has no ‘currency’ for the swarm of peers in the BitTorrent network. As a result, Meta must steal someone else’s cachet to stay in these swarms so that it can download files,” the opposition brief reads.

“Plaintiffs’ works are ideal. Not only do they serve as unique data for AI training, they are popular both commercially and in the BitTorrent network, ensuring that Meta could stay in swarms and download even more files,” they add.

While this is an interesting argument, our understanding of the BitTorrent protocol is that the reciprocal “tit-for-tat” advantages are limited to single torrent swarms. This means that the “currency” benefits do not extend to other downloads in different swarms. We assume that Meta’s legal team will have some thoughts on this as well.

All in all, the porn producers believe that Meta’s defenses are not up to par. They argue there is sufficient ground to survive a motion to dismiss and move the case forward, so it can be argued on its merits.

“Meta’s Motion is an attempt to thwart the protections Congress enacted in the Copyright Act. Respectfully, Plaintiffs simply ask for their day in court and ask this Court to deny the Motion.”

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A copy of the opposition brief Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed in response to Meta’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf). A hearing on the motion to dismiss is scheduled for January 21, 2026.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Ein neuer GDC-Report zeigt große Unzufriedenheit trotz im Schnitt 142.000 US-Dollar Gehalt in der US-Spielebranche. (GDC, Studien)

Kurz nachdem bekannt wurde, dass Star Trek 4 nicht kommen wird, hat Paramount einen neuen Star-Trek-Film angekündigt. (Star Trek, Film)

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Mit bemerkenswerter Technik und 3D-gedrucktem Stahlrahmen soll sich das Waldwiesel abheben. Aber was bringt das auf der Straße und im Gelände? Ein Praxistest von Mario Petzold (E-Bike, Test)

If Donald Trump loses his Supreme Court fight over tariffs, the US may be forced to return “tens of billions of dollars to companies that have paid import fees this year, plus interest,” The Atlantic reported. And the longer the verdict is delayed, the higher the refunds could go, possibly even hitting $1 trillion.

For tech companies both large and small, the stakes are particularly high. A Trump defeat would not just mean clawing back any duties paid on imports to the US that companies otherwise can use to invest in their competitiveness. But, more critically in the long term, it would also end tariff shocks that, as economics lecturer Matthew Allen emphasized in a report for The Conversation, risked harming “innovation itself” by destabilizing global partnerships and diverse supply chains in “tech-intensive, IP-led sectors like semiconductors and software.”

Currently, the Supreme Court is weighing two cases that argue that the US president does not have unilateral authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Defending his regime of so-called “reciprocal tariffs,” Trump argued these taxes were necessary to correct the “emergency” of enduring trade imbalances that he alleged have unfairly enriched other countries while bringing the US “to the brink of catastrophic decline.”

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