Snap Inc is being sued by YouTubers for alleged copyright infringement, after a group of content creators filed a proposed class action against the Snapchat parent entity in a United States (US) District Court, escalating legal scrutiny of how AI companies source AI training data.
Specifically, Ted Entertainment Inc, Matt Fisher and Golfholics Inc filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of a broader class of YouTube creators. To explain, the complaint alleges that Snap accessed and used YouTube-uploaded videos to train and develop generative AI systems that now power features across Snapchat’s product offerings. According to the filing, this took place without creators’ consent or compensation, and formed part of Snap’s commercial AI development efforts.
Importantly, the proposed class includes all individuals in the US who uploaded original videos to YouTube and whose content was allegedly included in the large-scale video datasets cited in the complaint. The plaintiffs contend that these datasets were central to Snap’s AI training pipeline and incorporated creators’ works at scale. Notably, the plaintiffs have filed similar class action lawsuits against ByteDance, Meta, and Nvidia.
Pertinently, the plaintiffs ask the court to issue a declaration that Snap wilfully circumvented copyright protection systems on YouTube, award statutory damages, costs, and interest, in addition to injunctive relief to prevent any further use of the disputed video content.
Allegations In Detail
According to the complaint, Snap Inc allegedly developed and trained its generative AI video systems by accessing and copying YouTube-hosted videos at scale. This is despite the fact that YouTube only makes audio-visual works available through controlled streaming, not providing access to the underlying video files.
The plaintiffs allege that Snap relied on large-scale video datasets, including HD-VILA-100M and the Panda-70M dataset. Notably, the HD-VILA-100M dataset contains identifiers and timestamps pointing to YouTube videos rather than the videos themselves.
The complaint further alleges that Snap had to retrieve and copy the referenced videos directly from YouTube to use them for AI training, as these datasets do not include audio-visual files. According to the filing, this required Snap to circumvent YouTube’s technological protection measures and access controls designed to prevent downloading and bulk extraction. The plaintiffs allege that Snap used automated tools and workflows to bypass these restrictions.
Additionally, the complaint remarks that the datasets divided individual YouTube videos into multiple clips, requiring repeated downloads of the same source video. As a result, Snap carried out millions of separate acts of copying the essentially the same source videos.
The plaintiffs further allege that Snap used the copied videos to train and improve…
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