On October 2, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley reportedly denied ByteDance’s motion to dismiss a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), allowing Ted Entertainment and Matt Fisher to proceed. The plaintiffs allege that ByteDance bypassed YouTube’s anti-scraping measures to obtain videos for generative AI training; the claim’s procedural progress leaves that allegation unresolved.
What the creators allege
Ted Entertainment and Matt Fisher allege that ByteDance obtained YouTube videos by bypassing measures designed to prevent scraping, then used them to train generative AI systems. MagicVideo was also named in the dispute; the system is described as generating video from text and images.
ByteDance’s argument about public videos
ByteDance argued that the videos were freely viewable on YouTube and that the complaint did not allege viewers had to overcome a paywall, password, authentication gate, encryption barrier or similar restriction to watch them.
That argument concerns access to watch videos through YouTube. The plaintiffs’ claim focuses on the separate allegation that ByteDance bypassed anti-scraping measures to obtain them.
