A group of YouTubers suing the tech giant for using their videos without permission to train AI models has now added Snap to its list of defendants.
The plaintiffs, content creators of three YouTube channels with a combined audience of about 6.2 million people, allege that Snap trained its AI system on its video content for features such as “Imagine Lens,” which lets users edit images via text prompts.
Plaintiffs previously filed similar lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance over similar issues.
New lawsuits and subject matter of litigation
In a recently filed complaint filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the plaintiffs specifically name Snap for using a large dataset of video and language data, including HD-VILA-100M and other materials, solely for academic and research purposes.
Plaintiffs say Snap circumvented YouTube’s technical restrictions, terms of service, and licensing restrictions that prohibit commercial use.
The lawsuit seeks statutory damages and a permanent injunction against further violations.
The people and industry background behind this incident
The lawsuit is led by the creator of the YouTube channel h3h3, which has 5.52 million subscribers, and smaller companies MrShortGame Golf and Golfoolics.
The lawsuit is part of a broader lawsuit between content creators and AI model providers. According to the Copyright Alliance, more than 70 copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed against companies using AI.
Future steps and snap position
In several other cases, courts have ruled in favor of the companies, such as Meta v. Author Group, or Anthropic has reached settlements with authors by paying compensation to plaintiffs. Many lawsuits are still pending.
We asked Snap for comment. TechCrunch will update this article if we receive a response.
This case therefore highlights the growing wave of legal battles between content creators and AI model providers, raising the issue of copyright in the age of digitalization.
