A US judge appeared unconvinced by ByteDance’s argument that accessing publicly available YouTube videos to train AI models did not violate anti-circumvention rules.
A US federal judge sounded doubtful of TikTok owner ByteDance’s arguments that a copyright lawsuit over the company's allegedly illegal use of YouTube videos for AI training should be dismissed because the content at issue is publicly available.
ByteDance is accused of violating the anti-circumvention rule in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, by accessing and downloading videos from YouTube to train AI video-generation models, according to the proposed class action lawsuit filed by content creators.
“I don't know how that's not at this stage circumventing,”
US District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said in a hearing on Thursday, in response to ByteDance’s argument that no circumvention had happened in this case. Corley reserved her ruling for later.
ByteDance lawyer Anne Voigts said there is “a clear distinction between YouTube allowing access versus efforts to prevent copying.”
“Copy controls are not covered by the circumvention provision,”
she said. The plaintiffs have not raised a copyright claim.
The plaintiffs alleged that ByteDance bypassed YouTube’s restrictions and deployed automated systems to access the underlying videos in an unauthorized manner. ByteDance allegedly used a “video-downloading program combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to avoid detection and blocking.”
ByteDance argued that the videos are publicly available on YouTube, and the technological protection measures, TPMs, put in place by YouTube to prevent certain actions such as downloading are not to prevent the “initial contact.”
These measures do not qualify as access control because they are “conditional,” Voigts said, meaning they are “only triggered by certain patterns of usage.”
But Corley said “at the motion to dismiss, if I’m drawing inferences in the plaintiffs’ favor,” the TPMs serve the purposes of anti-circumvention.
“The allegation is that they still downloaded the video and they circumvented measures that were put in to prohibit that, and they were injured by that. I don't understand why that wouldn't fall within the control,”
she said.
“Because what matters is the access, not the copying,”
Voigts said.
“So your argument is that access only means viewing, and that if you actually take something, that's not access?”
Corley asked.
In response, Voigts used an analogy of someone taking a picture of a book in a library. “That might separately run afoul of copyright … But simply going in and looking at it, where there is no prohibition on my access, is not a violation of the DMCA,” she said.
Corley also sounded unconvinced by ByteDance’s argument that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue because they have not alleged any injuries.
“I see where they plausibly allege injury and they do allege that they're losing these views that are monetized. Why isn’t that sufficient at this stage to show … standing?”
Voigts said it’s because “there no connection between the injuries that they allege and the actual conduct.”
Morgan McCollum, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued that there is “a plausible connection between the injuries alleged and the wrongdoing,” which is the circumvention of the access controls.
“When ByteDance circumvented the access controls, they didn't register views, they didn't register clicks on the videos, and that deprived plaintiffs and other content creators of revenue that they generate through YouTube from clicks and views on that, or … the economic opportunities they gain from algorithmic amplification,”
she said.
Source: MLex
