Judge lets claim that Runway bypassed YouTube's protections to train models proceed

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York denied a motion by Runway AI to dismiss a putative class action brought by YouTube creators Ace Cam, Inc. (which trades as Random Golf Club) and Businessing LLC. They allege that Runway, which develops text-to-video and image-to-video models, circumvented YouTube’s technical protections to download videos for training. The only claim at issue is under section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars circumventing a measure that controls access to a copyrighted work. There is no copyright infringement claim in the opinion.

The plaintiffs identify five YouTube measures, among them a “rolling cipher” that withholds a usable file location until a scrambled signature is transformed, rate limiting and IP blocking, session-bound URLs, CAPTCHAs and proof-of-origin tokens. They allege that Runway used tools such as yt-dlp and rotated IP addresses to get past them, and that at least 1,200 of Businessing’s videos and 390 of Random Golf Club’s were scraped. Runway denied that these were access controls at all: the videos are publicly viewable, it argued, so the measures at most stop copying, which section 1201(a) does not reach.

Kaplan disagreed on each point at this stage. He held that the statute’s definition of circumvention is broad, that a measure can be both an access control and a copy control, and that public availability does not remove protection because every viewer’s access passes through YouTube’s controls. He found it plausible that at least one measure was bypassed, and that creators who upload to YouTube authorise it to deploy the measures on their behalf. The ruling accepts the plaintiffs’ allegations as true; nothing has been proved, and the case continues.

The ChatGPT Is Eating the World litigation tracker described the opinion as similar to recent rulings by other judges allowing YouTube-based section 1201 claims to proceed, including against Udio, Suno, Snap and Apple. The theory gives plaintiffs a route that does not depend on resolving fair use for training, and the same provision features in the claims against Brave filed days later.