YouTubers’ data scraping suit against ByteDance lives on

The plaintiffs claim ByteDance bypassed YouTube's protections when accessing their videos, cheating them out of advertising revenue.SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge ruled Friday YouTubers have standing in a suit accusing tech giant ByteDance of data mining their videos to train artificial intelligence modelsU.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ruled that Ted Entertainment and Matt Fisher properly claimed at this stage that they’ve suffered what she called a pocketbook injury.Ted Entertainment, a company, and Fisher, an individual, create and post original content to YouTube and claim a large reason they chose the site was because of its protective measures, like forbidding people from data mining.“As one court already ruled in a similar suit brought by plaintiffs, ‘[a]s alleged, the barriers exist and require users to satisfy certain conditions before obtaining access,” Corley, a Joe Biden appointee wrote. “Those barriers may be modest, perhaps by design given YouTube’s business model, but they are barriers nonetheless. At the pleadings stage, plaintiffs’ allegations are sufficient.’”The plaintiffs argued that ByteDance bypassed YouTube’s protections, meaning their content didn’t receive views that would have generated advertising revenue.ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is building several AI projects, which they want to turn language prompts into audiovisual content. To achieve that goal, the AI needs large amounts of data as training material — data that comes from the plaintiffs’ work, they say.The plaintiffs claimed ByteDance violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which enables a private right of action for someone who’s been injured. However, ByteDance argued the plaintiffs had no injury, and therefore no standing.The supposed injury is the copying of materials used to train AI, not the circumvention of YouTube’s security measures. The plaintiffs didn’t properly claim an injury linked to that circumvention, ByteDance argued.Corley noted the plaintiffs made a handful of claims, including that the circumvention led to lost advertising revenue and lost YouTube Premium revenue.“Drawing inferences in plaintiffs’ favor, plaintiffs ‘lost per-view advertising revenue that YouTube’s monetization system would otherwise have generated,’” the judge wrote, adding: “So, plaintiffs plausibly allege their pocketbook injury is directly traceable to defendant’s circumvention sufficient to support standing.”ByteDance cited what Corley called inapplicable cases in its defense which involved no monetary harm and had no focus on the link between the injury and statutory violation, leading to her decision in favor of the plaintiffs.Pivoting to the question of statutory standing, Corley wrote that plaintiffs under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act must fit within a group Congress has allowed to sue. ByteDance said the plaintiffs didn’t meet that definition. That’s because the private right of action is linked to the owner of the circumvented measure, not anyone who puts content on a platform like YouTube with its own controls.However, Corley wrote that the statute states “any person injured by a violation,” as well as owners of protected material, fall within that group.The judge again found ByteDance’s cited cases unpersuasive.“These cases thus reaffirm, rather than undermine, that copyright owners such as plaintiffs are at the very heart of the ‘zone of interests’ Congress sought to protect.” Corley added.Attorneys on either side of the case couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads