• by Wendy Davis , 4 hours ago

ByteDance must face a lawsuit alleging it wrongly scraped YouTube videos to train generative artificial intelligence models such as MagicVideo, which creates videos from texts and images, a federal judge has ruled.

The ruling, issued late last week by Jacqueline Scott Corley, comes in a lawsuit brought by Ted Entertainment (which operates YouTube channels including h3h3 Productions) and Matt Fisher (who creates golf videos that he posts to the YouTube channel MrShortGame Golf).

They alleged in a class-action complaint filed in December that ByteDance (which currently owns nearly 20% of TikTok in the U.S.) violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing YouTube's anti-scraping measures. That law prohibits people from bypassing technology that controls access to digital content.

ByteDance urged Corley to dismiss the claim at an early stage of the proceedings, arguing that even if the scraping allegations were proven true, they wouldn't show that it "circumvented" controls on copyrighted material.

"Plaintiffs concede that their videos are free to watch on YouTube," ByteDance argued, adding that the complaint lacks allegations that people must "overcome a paywall, password, authentication gate, license key, encryption barrier, or any other technological restriction before perceiving the works."

ByteDance added: "By uploading their videos to YouTube, plaintiffs grant YouTube users a worldwide license to access and view those videos through the platform."

Corley rejected that argument for now, allowing Ted Entertainment and Fisher to proceed with their claim.

She noted in the ruling that another judge, Andre Birotte, Jr. in the Central District of California, recently allowed Ted Entertainment and Fisher to proceed with nearly identical claims against Snap.

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