Strike 3

For the baseball term, see Strikeout.

Strike 3 is an American copyright trolling company based in Delaware. The parent company of the pornography production company Vixen Media Group (VMG), the firm had filed more than 20,000 copyright lawsuits against users alleged to have pirated VMG and other Strike 3 owned pornographic films by November 2025, making them the single most prolific filer in the US.^[1]

Strike 3

Company type	Holding company
Industry	Pornography
Founded	2015
Founder	Greg Lansky
Headquarters	Delaware
Area served	Worldwide
Subsidiaries	Vixen Media Group

Greg Lansky co-founded Strike 3 in 2015 as a holding company. He had previously founded VMG, a pornography production company, though sold his stake in 2020. Strike 3 owns the copyright to at least 2,396 adult films, mostly by VMG.^[1] In mid-2017, Strike 3 hired the lawyer Emilie Kennedy, who had previously worked for Keith Lipscomb's law firm on a campaign of copyright trolling on behalf of Malibu Media.^[1][2]

Strike 3 began a similar campaign in September 2017. They would accuse defendants of illegally downloading a single adult film via BitTorrent and ask judges to subpoena the internet service provider to provide personal information about the subscriber. They would then send them a letter threatening them with the statutory penalties for copyright infringement and implying that they will be outed as a user of pornography.^[3] They would then offer to settle for just under what a basic defense would cost;^[1] in July 2018, this was typically between $1,000 and $8,000.^[2] Lawsuits initially identified defendants using a German detection tool before Strike 3 debuted their own tracking software in 2018, VXN Scan.^[1]

By July 2018, the firm had partnered with xTakeDowns.com, who were sending up to 50,000 daily take-down notices on behalf of Strike 3.^[2] They sued Meta Platforms in July 2025, alleging that they had used at least 2,396 of their films for training artificial intelligence.^[1] Their lawsuit alleged that Meta had illegally distributed and seeded thousands of its videos on torrenting websites to more efficiently download other torrents.^[a][4][5] In response, Meta blamed employees, contractors, and visitors for their use, denied planning to produce AI-generated pornographic videos, and stated their terms prohibited generation of adult content.^[6]

By November 2025, all bar about ten cases out of more than 20,000 had been settled or withdrawn for reasons Strike 3 did not disclose and none had reached trial. The firm justifies its actions as defending themselves against piracy,^[1] although United States district court judge Royce Lamberth characterized this business model in November 2018 as "a high-tech shakedown" and accused the firm of treating the court "as an ATM."^[7]

Notes

1. Torrent websites operate a "tit-for-tat" mechanism whereby those who provide and facilitate other users downloading popular content can download other content at higher speeds.