Rise of the 'porno-trolls': how one porn platform made millions suing its viewers & now going after META for AI training

When 73-year-old Tom Brown*, a retired police officer from Seattle, received a letter from Comcast, he might have mistaken it for a broadband bill. Instead, it was a subpoena. He had been sued in federal court for illegally downloading 80 movies. Some of the titles sounded cryptic – Do Not Worry, We Are Only Friends – or banal, like International Relations Part 2. Others were less subtle: He Loved My Big Ass, He Loved My Big Butt, and My Big Booty Loves Anal.

Brown, who had spent decades investigating sex crimes, claimed he had never watched any of them. His years “dealing with pimping”, he wrote in a court filing, left him “with no interest in pornography”. He had been married for 40 years, he did not need to download Hot Wife, another title in the list. But the subpoena did not seem like something he could laugh off. It said he could face damages of up to $150,000 per movie – as much as $12m for all 80 films. If he did not respond promptly, the letter said, Comcast would identify him to the plaintiff in the case: a company called Strike 3 Holdings.

Strike 3 is not a name that Brown, or most people outside the world of copyright law, would recognize. The Delaware-based corporation, formed in 2015, owns the intellectual property rights to a catalog of about 2,000 adult films, mostly made by Vixen Media Group, its porn production subsidiary. It had very little online footprint; no social presence to speak of. But its associates were better known. The company was co-founded by Greg Lansky, the French porn director whose recent pivot to the art world has yielded works such as Algorithmic Beauty, a marble reproduction of the Venus de Milo with breast implants taking a selfie.

Lansky, a 42-year-old Parisian, was something of a celebrity in the adult industry, having formed Vixen, the production company behind some of the porn world’s most popular brands: Vixen, Slayed, Wifey, Milf-y, Tushy, Tushy Raw, Blacked, Blacked Raw. The studio’s commitment to high-production value had attracted dozens of awards in adult media and write-ups from outlets outside it. How One Pornographer Is Trying to Elevate Porn to Art,

https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2025/nov/04/strike-3-porn-copyright-lawsuits