YouTube sues Snap over alleged copyright infringement in AI model training

Content creators, who previously filed lawsuits against tech giants for allegedly scraping their videos without permission to train AI models, have now added Snap to the list of defendants. The plaintiffs are creators behind three YouTube channels with a combined subscriber base of approximately 6.2 million. They allege that Snap used their video content to train its AI features, such as the app's "Imagine Lens," which enables users to edit images through text prompts.

The plaintiffs had previously initiated similar legal actions against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance.

In the newly filed proposed class-action lawsuit, submitted on Friday to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the YouTubers specifically point to Snap's use of a large-scale video-language dataset named HD-VILA-100M, among other datasets designed solely for academic and research purposes. The plaintiffs claim that Snap circumvented YouTube's technical restrictions, terms of service, and licensing limitations, which prohibit commercial use.

The lawsuit seeks statutory damages and a permanent injunction to prevent future copyright infringement.

The case is spearheaded by the creator of the h3h3 YouTube channel, which boasts 5.52 million subscribers, along with the smaller golf-focused channels MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics.

This now joins a growing number of lawsuits pitting content creators against AI model providers, encompassing copyright disputes from publishers, authors, newspapers, user-generated content websites, artists, and others. It is also not the first case initiated by a YouTuber. According to the nonprofit Copyright Alliance, over 70 copyright infringement cases have been filed against AI companies. In some instances, such as the case between Meta and a group of authors, judges have ruled in favor of the tech giant. In others, like the case involving Anthropic and a group of authors, the AI giant settled with the plaintiffs, paying compensation to resolve their claims. Many cases remain actively litigated.