A group of YouTubers suing major tech companies over the alleged scraping of their videos to train AI models has added Snap as a new defendant.
The plaintiffs, who collectively run three YouTube channels with about 6.2 million subscribers, claim Snap trained its AI systems on their video content without permission. According to the lawsuit, that material was used to power AI features such as Snapchat’s “Imagine Lens,” which lets users edit images using text prompts.
The creators had previously filed similar lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance, alleging those firms also used their content to train AI models without authorization.
Claims Around Research-Only Datasets
The newly filed proposed class action, submitted Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, focuses in part on Snap’s alleged use of HD-VILA-100M, a large-scale video-language dataset. The plaintiffs argue that this and similar datasets were created strictly for academic and research purposes.
According to the complaint, using these datasets commercially would violate their licenses. The YouTubers allege Snap bypassed YouTube’s technological safeguards, terms of service, and licensing restrictions, which prohibit commercial use of such content without permission.
The suit seeks statutory damages as well as a permanent injunction to prevent any further alleged copyright infringement.
Who’s Behind The Case
The lawsuit is led by the creators of the h3h3 YouTube channel, which has more than 5.5 million subscribers. They are joined by the creators behind the smaller golf-focused channels MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics.
Part Of A Growing Legal Wave
The case adds to a growing list of lawsuits pitting content creators against AI developers. These disputes span publishers, authors, newspapers, artists, and user-generated content platforms. According to the nonprofit Copyright Alliance, more than 70 copyright infringement cases have now been filed against AI companies.
Outcomes have been mixed. In one high-profile case, a judge ruled in favor of Meta in a lawsuit brought by a group of authors. In another, Anthropic settled with authors and paid to resolve similar claims. Many other cases remain in active litigation, with courts still weighing how copyright law applies to AI training practices.
Featured image credits: Flickr
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