• by Wendy Davis , 6 hours ago

Content creators can proceed with a lawsuit claiming Apple scraped their YouTube videos in order to train generative artificial intelligence model that convert text to videos, a federal judge has ruled.

The ruling -- issued Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg -- comes in a lawsuit brought in April 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 that Apple 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.

The complaint against Apple included allegations that it "used automated video-downloading programs combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to avoid detection and blocking," in order to enable "mass unauthorized access and extraction of videos."

Apple sought a fast dismissal, arguing that even if the allegations were proven true, they wouldn't show that Apple circumvented technological controls on access given that YouTube videos are publicly available.

Seeborg rejected that argument, writing that YouTube's technological controls "limit users’ access to a singular platform, the website’s authorized streaming architecture."

"Accessing YouTube videos in any other way violates YouTube’s terms" and circumvents its technological controls, he wrote.

The ruling allows Ted Entertainment to proceed with its suit, but doesn't mean it will ultimately prevail.

The decision marks at least the third time a federal judge has allowed Ted Entertainment to pursue similar lawsuits against tech companies. Earlier this month, a district court judge rejected ByteDance's bid to throw out Ted Entertainment's suit and, in August, a judge said the company could proceed with a nearly identical claim against Snap.

Ted Entertainment and others have also sued other tech companies including Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Amazon. Those matters are pending in federal courts in California and Washington.