A group of YouTubers has filed a lawsuit against Snap Inc. for allegedly violating copyright laws by scraping their videos without permission. As TechCrunch noted, the class action suit, while not a complete surprise, has been officially filed. It was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
As alleged by the plaintiffs, Snap misappropriated their video content to train its artificial intelligence models. This scraping resulted in the creation of a multi-million dollar large-scale video-language dataset described in their paper HD-VILA-100M. There are no restrictions on non-commercial academic use. According to the YouTubers, Snap’s use violates their copyrights. They further feel that these practices warp the intended purpose of the HD-VILA-100M dataset.
One of the plaintiffs, the Coalition for App Fairness, has a history of suing large tech companies for similar claims. So far, they’ve made Nvidia, Meta and ByteDance their targets in lawsuits. This move shines a light on their continuously aggressive pursuits to stifle copyright infringement in the digital domain.
Sarah Perez, a veteran reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011, laid out the whole story on this new twist in detail. To talk more, she can be found on email sarahp@techcrunch.com or encrypted message on Signal at sarahperez.01.
The lawsuit against Snap is the latest indication of increasing content creator and technology company tensions over how companies use online content. AI technologies are changing incredibly fast. This case has the potential to set critical precedents for how we engage with digital content and maintain protections for creators’ rights in this new digital landscape.
