ByteDance's YouTube scraping defense draws a skeptical judge

ByteDance Inc. told a San Francisco federal court on September 24 that downloading millions of publicly available YouTube videos to train its MagicVideo text-to-video model cannot be the "unauthorized access" the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids, and the judge hearing the motion sounded unlikely to accept the argument.

Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the Northern District of California questioned ByteDance's reading of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision at a hearing in Courtroom 8 at 450 Golden Gate Avenue, according to Bloomberg Law's account of the hearing. "I don't know how that's not, at this stage, circumventing," Bloomberg Law reported Corley saying.

The case is Ted Entertainment, Inc., Matt Fisher and Golfholics, Inc. v. ByteDance Inc., filed in the Northern District of California as 3:25-cv-10933-JSC. The three plaintiffs brought it on their own behalf and for a proposed nationwide class of YouTube creators. Ted Entertainment is the company behind the H3 Podcast, Fisher runs the golf channel MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics is a golf content company.

The claim is narrow and it is not a copyright infringement claim. The first amended complaint, filed April 13, 2026, alleges ByteDance violated the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions at 17 U.S.C. §1201(a) by breaking through the technical measures YouTube uses to deliver video. The complaint describes those measures as tokenized requests, segmented delivery protocols and player-based reconstruction, and alleges ByteDance deployed a video-downloading program paired with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to evade detection and blocking.

ByteDance filed its motion to dismiss on July 6, 2026 on two grounds. First, under Rule 12(b)(1), that the plaintiffs lack both Article III and statutory standing to bring a §1201(a) claim at all. Second, under Rule 12(b)(6), that the complaint fails to state a claim, because video a creator published publicly is not protected by an access control in the sense the statute requires.

That argument is the crux. The statute prohibits circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a work, and ByteDance's position is that nothing was circumvented when the work was available to anyone with a browser. The complaint anticipates the point directly, arguing that YouTube streams video through a controlled architecture and never serves the underlying file, so the copy ByteDance wanted sits behind a lock regardless of who can watch the stream.

Creators should read the case as a test of a theory rather than of a company. Every AI video model trained on public video rests on the same assumption, that public availability settles the question, and the parallel suits against other model makers turn on it too, according to a tracker of the filings maintained at classyaction.app. That tracker lists separate complaints over Amazon's Nova Reel, Nvidia's Cosmos, Meta's Make-a-Video, Snap's Imagine Lens and OpenAI's Sora.

If the claim survives, the remedy is statutory damages rather than a licence fee, sought under 17 U.S.C. §1203 along with an injunction. The complaint argues that content taken into a model cannot be recovered, which is why it asks the court to stop the practice rather than price it. The complaint also notes that most YouTube videos are not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, and argues registration was never a precondition for a §1201(a) claim.

The docket listing SLOP TV read on September 25, 2026 showed no order resolving the motion, and no scheduling entry appeared on the pages available. No ruling has been reported either. A hearing is not a decision, and ByteDance's arguments on standing have not been addressed in public.

Next step: Judge Corley's written order on the motion to dismiss. A denial sends the case into discovery over how ByteDance built MagicVideo, and a dismissal with prejudice ends the claim at the trial level unless the plaintiffs appeal.