YouTubers sue Snap for alleged copyright infringement in AI models

On Friday, a group of internet content creators filed a proposed class action suit—which is a lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of plaintiffs—against Snap in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The plaintiffs, who run a trio of YouTube channels with roughly 6.2 million collective subscribers, allege that Snap trained its AI systems on their video content without permission. The legal action is led by the creators behind the h3h3 YouTube channel, which has 5.52 million subscribers, alongside the smaller golfing channels MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics. The lawsuit alleges that Snap used this video content to train AI features such as its “Imagine Lens,” which allows users to edit images using text prompts.

The core of the dispute centers on how Snap acquired the training data. According to the plaintiffs, Snap used a large-scale, video-language dataset known as HD-VILA-100M, alongside other datasets designed strictly for academic and research purposes. To use these datasets for commercial applications, the plaintiffs claim Snap circumvented YouTube’s technological restrictions, terms of service, and licensing limitations, which prohibit commercial use. This highlights the ongoing tension between AI developers using academic datasets and the commercial restrictions imposed by platforms like YouTube. The lawsuit seeks statutory damages and a permanent injunction to stop the alleged copyright infringement.

This legal action is not an isolated incident but part of a broader conflict between content creators and artificial intelligence developers. The plaintiffs previously filed similar lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance over similar training data practices. According to the nonprofit organization Copyright Alliance, over 70 copyright infringement cases have been filed against AI companies. The outcomes of these cases have been mixed: while judges have ruled in favor of tech giants in some instances, such as a case involving Meta and a group of authors, other AI companies like Anthropic have settled with and paid out plaintiffs to resolve their claims. Many of these cases remain in active litigation.

Why it matters

This lawsuit underscores the escalating legal friction between AI developers relying on academic datasets and the commercial restrictions enforced by content platforms, marking a significant expansion of the copyright battleground.