YouTubers’ data scraping suit against ByteDance lives on

Filed 50m ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Entrance of the Gladiators

Fučík — U.S. Marine Band · Public Domain

Photo: Carol M. Highsmith · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that YouTube creators Ted Entertainment and Matt Fisher have standing to sue ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, over claims it bypassed YouTube's anti-scraping protections to harvest video data for AI training.

U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley found the plaintiffs plausibly alleged a pocketbook injury: lost per-view advertising revenue traceable to ByteDance's alleged circumvention of YouTube's barriers. ByteDance had argued the plaintiffs' real complaint was about data copying for AI, not the circumvention itself, and that they didn't qualify as the kind of injured party Congress intended to protect under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Corley rejected that reading, finding copyright owners like the plaintiffs sit squarely within the law's protected 'zone of interests.' The suit now proceeds past the pleadings stage, with attorneys for both sides unavailable for comment.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A company builds an AI that needs other people's work to function, and acts surprised when those people ask for a cut. The judge basically said the barriers may be modest, but a fence is still a fence, and stepping over it still counts as trespassing. Expect this one to drag on, because nobody with an AI model to feed walks away from a lawsuit just because the math is bad for them.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Entrance of the Gladiators · Fučík — U.S. Marine Band · CC BY 4.0

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