Ace Cam, Inc. v. Runway AI, Inc

In putative class action by content creators alleging defendant generative AI video company harvested YouTube videos to train its models, district court denies motion to dismiss, finding that plaintiffs adequately stated claim under DMCA by alleging defendant evaded YouTube’s various content protection measures to scrape site and access plaintiffs’ videos. 

Ace Cam Inc. (known as Random Golf Club) and Businessing LLC are content creation businesses that upload videos to YouTube. When they do so, according to their allegations, they authorize YouTube to act as their platform and deploy technological protection measures (TPMs) to ensure that their content can only be viewed by users through the YouTube platform and without violating YouTube’s terms of service (which forbid scraping, unauthorized downloading and other unpermitted uses). YouTube’s TPMs come in several forms, including IP blocking and rate limiting in response to abnormal request volume, required CAPTCHA challenges following suspicious traffic patterns, a rolling cipher that withholds files until they are displayed to the user in response to a digital signature, and more.

Runway AI Inc. is an AI company developing text-to-video and image-to-video AI models. According to plaintiffs, Runway circumvented YouTube’s TPMs to access and download YouTube content that it then used to train its AI models. The circumvention was allegedly accomplished through specific tools and techniques that bypassed or evaded YouTube’s TPMs, such as descrambling programs and IP address rotation.

In response to Runway’s alleged use of their videos, plaintiffs sued on behalf of a putative class for violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s provision prohibiting “circumvent[ion of] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”—17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201(a). Runway moved to dismiss, contending that Section 1201(a) does not protect plaintiffs’ content and that plaintiffs had otherwise failed to state a claim. The district court, however, disagreed.

First, the court rejected Runway’s argument that its efforts with respect to plaintiffs’ content on YouTube was, at most, circumventing copying controls, which are not protected by Section 1201. As the court explained, while the works are not scrambled or encrypted, YouTube’s various tools blocked access to videos on the site in response to signs of unauthorized behaviors. Though the tools may also block copying, Section 1201 does not require that TPMs serve only a single purpose.

The court also rejected defendant’s arguments centered on the fact that plaintiffs’ videos are publicly available for viewing on YouTube for free, as opposed to being behind a paywall or similar restriction. In the court’s view, plaintiffs alleged various means through which YouTube’s TPMs could have been circumvented. As plaintiffs alleged, the TPMs applied to anyone who tried to interact with the videos, regardless of whether they sought to view or download them, so while viewing may be free, the content was not unprotected. Indeed, the TPMs restricted even basic viewing of a video if triggered, according to plaintiffs.

Finally, the court disagreed with defendant’s contention that plaintiffs could not state a claim because they lacked authority over YouTube’s TPMs. The statutory text does not, in the view of the court, require that plaintiffs put TPMs in place themselves; it requires only that their work was subject to the circumvented TPMs. Here, plaintiffs alleged that they authorized YouTube to put the TPMs guarding their works in place, which the court held was sufficient.

Summary prepared by Frank D’Angelo and Tyler Downing