ByteDance data scraping lawsuit moved forward Friday after a federal judge in San Francisco found two YouTube creators had adequately alleged financial harm tied to the company’s alleged circumvention of YouTube’s protections.
U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ruled that Ted Entertainment and Matt Fisher plausibly claimed a pocketbook injury at this stage, allowing their case to proceed. The creators say they chose YouTube in part because of the platform’s safeguards that restrict automated harvesting of content.
“Those barriers may be modest, perhaps by design given YouTube’s business model, but they are barriers nonetheless,” Corley wrote, concluding the plaintiffs’ allegations are sufficient at the pleadings stage.
ByteDance data scraping lawsuit centers on alleged circumvention
The plaintiffs contend ByteDance bypassed YouTube’s measures, diverting views that would otherwise have generated advertising and YouTube Premium revenue. ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, is developing artificial intelligence projects that aim to transform language prompts into audiovisual content. The suit alleges ByteDance used large volumes of data, including the plaintiffs’ videos, to train those models.
According to court filings, the plaintiffs bring claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides a private right of action for those injured by violations of anti-circumvention provisions. ByteDance argued the creators lacked injury and therefore lacked standing, asserting the alleged harm stemmed from copying materials for AI training rather than from any circumvention of YouTube’s controls.
Corley wrote that, drawing inferences in the plaintiffs’ favor, the alleged loss of per-view ad revenue and YouTube Premium revenue is directly traceable to the purported circumvention, which is sufficient for Article III standing.
Statutory standing under the DMCA
Addressing statutory standing, the court considered whether the plaintiffs fall within the class Congress authorized to sue under the DMCA. ByteDance maintained that only the owner of the circumvented technological measure may sue, not creators who post to a platform with its own controls. Corley concluded the statute encompasses “any person injured by a violation,” in addition to owners of protected material, and found ByteDance’s cited cases unpersuasive.
Corley wrote that the decisions ByteDance relied upon did not involve monetary harm or did not engage with the link between the injury and the statutory violation. She added that copyright owners such as the plaintiffs fall within the zone of interests the DMCA is designed to protect.
Attorneys for both sides did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, did not immediately comment on the ruling. The allegations mirror broader concerns over how technology companies train artificial intelligence models on copyrighted materials.
The lawsuit arrives amid a wave of AI-related litigation, including cases such as the Perplexity AI lawsuit that also tests how existing laws apply to emerging technologies. Legal observers are watching to see how courts interpret statutes like the DMCA in the context of large-scale data scraping.
YouTube’s technological measures are outlined in its policies and supported by parent company Google, which faces its own regulatory and legal challenges over data use. The outcome of the ByteDance case could influence how platforms and creators protect their content going forward.