A gaggle of YouTubers suing tech giants for scraping their videos without permission to coach AI models has now added Snap to its list of defendants. The plaintiffs — web content creators behind a trio of YouTube channels with about 6.2 million combined subscribers — allege that Snap trained its AI systems on their video content to be used in AI features resembling the app's “Imagine Lens,” which allows users to edit images using text prompts.
The plaintiffs had previously filed similar lawsuits against it Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance about similar matters.
In the newly filed proposed class motion lawsuit Men's suitFiled on Friday within the US District Court for the Central District of California, the YouTubers specifically criticize Snap for its use of a big, video-language data set called HD-VILA-100Mand others designed for educational and research purposes only. In order to make use of these datasets for business purposes, the plaintiffs allege that Snap circumvented YouTube's technical limitations, terms of use, and licensing restrictions that prohibit business use.
The lawsuit seeks statutory damages and a everlasting injunction to stop the alleged copyright infringement in the long run.
The case itself is led by the people behind it h3h3 YouTube channel with 5.52 million subscribers and the smaller golf channels MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics.
It is now one in all many lawsuits between content creators and AI model providers, which also include copyright disputes from publishers, authors, newspapers, user-generated content sites, artists, etc more. It is just too not the primary case come from a YouTuber. According to the nonprofit organization Copyright Alliance over 70 cases of copyright infringement Lawsuits have been filed against AI firms.
In some cases, resembling between Meta and a gaggle of authors, a judge has ruled in favor of the tech giant. In others, just like the case between Anthropic and a gaggle of authors, the AI giant settled with plaintiffs and paid them out to resolve their claims. In many cases, legal proceedings are still ongoing.
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Snap has been contacted for comment. TechCrunch will update when one is provided.
