In an opinion Friday, Judge Kaplan denied a motion by AI video developer Runway AI to dismiss a putative class action brought by YouTube creators. The creators allege that Runway got around YouTube’s technological protections to “scrape” their videos to train its AI models. For instance, YouTube blocks “abnormal request volumes” from the same IP address, but the creators allege that Runway “executed an IP rotation scheme to cycle through different IP addresses to avoid detection.”
The sole claim arises under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provision, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a), which makes it unlawful to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access” to copyrighted material. The term “circumvent” is further defined to include “avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing a technological measure.”
Runway’s main argument was that nothing was circumvented because anyone can watch YouTube videos for free. Runway contrasted that with cases involving passwords or paywalls.
Judge Kaplan, citing a somewhat similar ruling by Judge Engelmayer from earlier this year, emphasized that “Section 1201(a) defines circumvention broadly to encompass any measures which ‘otherwise . . . avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure.’” He explained that YouTube’s content, although publicly available, is in all events subject to protective measures that Runway allegedly bypassed or avoided:
The public nature of content that has been uploaded to YouTube does not render it unprotected because the public’s viewership of the content necessarily is subject to YouTube’s TPMs [technological protection measures].
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