UMG Records v. Uncharted Labs, Inc.

District court denies defendant’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s cause of action for circumvention of technological measures under DMCA in connection with plaintiff’s claim that defendant circumvented YouTube’s copyright protection measures in order to train its AI music tool.

Plaintiffs, a group of record companies and record music businesses, filed suit against defendant Unchartered Labs, Inc., d/b/a Udio.com, for allegedly using plaintiffs’ works to train its AI music generation tool. Among other claims, plaintiffs alleged that defendant circumvented YouTube’s technological measures, designed to block access to copyrighted works, to assemble a collection of plaintiffs’ copyrighted musical works in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Defendant moved to dismiss this cause of action.

According to plaintiffs, YouTube employs certain technologic measures, “including a ‘rolling cipher’ encryption measure, to control access to content uploaded on its platform and prevent or inhibit external sites or services from directly downloading protected media files.” Plaintiffs alleged that defendant utilized an illicit “stream ripping” tool to scrape plaintiffs’ copyrighted content from YouTube in order to train its AI tool, circumventing the technological measures in order to gain access to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works in violation of Section 1201(a) of the DMCA.

The court first noted that sections 1201(a) and 1202(b) focus on different technological protection measures; while subsection (a) focuses on tools that prevent access to a work, subsection (b) focuses on technologies that do not prevent access to a work but prevent copying. While trafficking in tools that are designed to circumvent either access controls or copy controls is prohibited by the statute, the use of these tools is only prohibited in the case of technologies designed to prevent access to a work. In order to overcome defendant’s motion to dismiss, plaintiffs must plausibly plead (1) that YouTube’s “rolling cipher” encryption technology constituted an access control and (2) that defendant actually circumvented that technology.

Defendant argued that YouTube’s encryption technology should be considered a copy control, primarily preventing copying of rather than access to a work on YouTube’s platform. The court rejected this argument, relying on a line of cases relating to the encryption of DVDs. Under those decisions, encryption technology on DVDs, which allow a purchaser to view a DVD’s content using only licensed players, did constitute an access control rather than a copy control. Defendant argued that YouTube’s rolling cipher encryption worked differently, but the court held that the complaint did not  establish how the measures functioned to the degree necessary to determine on a motion to dismiss whether any distinction might be dispositive. The court therefore held that defendant could renew that argument once the factual record was further developed. At the motion-to-dismiss stage, however, the court held that plaintiffs’ circumvention of technology claim was adequately pled.

Summary prepared by David Grossman and Erin Shields