Meta, ByteDance Hit With YouTubers’ AI Copyright Scraping Suits

Meta Platforms Inc. and ByteDance Ltd. were hit with class actions Tuesday from YouTubers who claimed the companies have used their videos to train generative AI models without permission.

The lawsuits filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California said the two social media giants are illegally scraping the videos off YouTube and using them to power Meta’s “Make-a-Video” AI model and ByteDance’s “MagicVideo” AI model. Those text-to-video models let users generate custom AI videos based on text prompts.

The suits were filed by internet content creators including the company behind the h3h3 comedy YouTube channel and the golfing channels Mr.ShortGame and Golfoholics.

Those same plaintiffs brought a nearly identical suit against Nvidia Corp. last month.

The complaints alleged that Meta and ByteDance evade YouTube’s copyright access restrictions to scrape the videos, violating the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that prohibits bypassing electronic security measures to access copyrighted works.

The suits notably don’t contain claims of copyright infringement, which requires the copyright owner to have registered their work with the US Copyright Office. The complaint said most YouTube videos aren’t registered.

“Content creators invest time, skill, and resources into producing their works, and they rely on YouTube’s technological protection measures to safeguard their files from unauthorized access,” the lawsuit said.

The suits seek to represent thousands of similar content creators as class actions.

The cases are Ted Entertainment Inc. v. Meta Platforms Inc., N.D. Cal., No. 3:25-cv-10931, 12/23/25 and Ted Entertainment Inc. v. ByteDance Inc., N.D. Cal., No. 5:25-cv-10933, 12/23/25.