• by Wendy Davis , 81 minutes ago

Snap must face content creators' claims that it wrongly scraped YouTube videos to train generative artificial intelligence models that can create videos from texts or images, a federal judge has ruled.

The ruling, issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Andre Birotte, Jr. in the Central District of California, comes in a lawsuit brought earlier this year by Ted Entertainment (which operates YouTube channels including h3h3 Productions), Matt Fisher (who creates golf videos that he posts to the YouTube channel MrShortGame Golf) and other plaintiffs.

They alleged in a class-action complaint that Snap violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing YouTube's anti-scraping measures. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits people from bypassing technology that controls access to digital content.

The complaint specifically alleges that YouTube uses "technological processes and tools to detect and block unauthorized downloading."

For instance, according to the complaint, YouTube "may block IP addresses that make too many download attempts in a specified time period."

Snap urged Birotte to dismiss the matter at an early stage, arguing that the allegations, even if proven true, wouldn't show that the company bypassed the type of digital locks contemplated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

"Plaintiffs do not allege that users encounter any technological measure before they are able to perceive the works -- no paywall, password, authentication, nor any other barrier," Snap wrote in a May filing.

Birotte rejected that argument.

"The fact that members of the public may ordinarily access the videos without payment does not establish that the works are technologically unrestricted," he wrote in a 17-page order allowing Ted Entertainment and the other plaintiffs to proceed with their complaint.

Ted Entertainment has filed similar lawsuits against at least six other large tech companies including Amazon, Apple, Meta, ByteDance and OpenAI. Those matters are pending in federal courts in California and Washington state.