Runway Must Face YouTube Creators’ Scraping Suit, Judge Rules

NEW YORK, Oct. 30 — AA federal judge in New York refused on Friday to dismiss a proposed class action accusing Runway, a maker of AI video models, of getting around YouTube’s technical protections to download creators’ videos for training. The suit makes no claim of copyright infringement. Its one count is under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ban on circumventing measures that control access to a work, and the creators seek statutory damages for each act of circumvention.Section 1201The provision reads: “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” Under Section 1203, a court may award statutory damages of “not less than $200 or more than $2,500 per act of circumvention” as it “considers just.”

The ruling, by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, comes on a motion to dismiss: it holds that the creators’ allegations, taken as true, state a claim, and makes no finding about what Runway did. The paper found no public comment from Runway on the decision.

The case tests a route around the question that has dominated the AI copyright suits. Runway’s lawyers, at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, wrote in May that the creators had not sued for infringement, “perhaps because other plaintiffs who have accused generative AI technologies of infringement have run headlong into the fair-use doctrine,” and that Congress “took great pains” to keep the statute from being used “as a get-out-of-fair-use-free card.” Friday’s 15-page opinion does not mention fair use.

The judge has written on the subject before. In 2000, ruling in a suit by eight film studios over the distribution of a program that circumvented the encryption on DVDs, a claim under the law’s ban on trafficking in such tools rather than on circumventing, Judge Kaplan wrote that “the decision not to make fair use a defense to a claim under Section 1201(a) was quite deliberate.”The DeCSS CaseUniversal City Studios v. Reimerdes, decided in the same court in August 2000, concerned DeCSS, a program that let encrypted DVD films be copied and played on devices without licensed decryption technology. The Second Circuit affirmed in 2001, as Universal City Studios v. Corley. Runway’s brief cited the same opinion for the balance it says Congress struck: the ban was confined “to the act itself,” so that fair use stayed “fully applicable” where “the access is authorized.”

The Measures

As Judge Kaplan summarized the complaint, YouTube uses five “technological protection measures” to keep its videos inside its own player: a rolling cipher that withholds a usable file location, IP blocking and rate limits, session-bound URLs, CAPTCHA challenges and proof-of-origin tokens. The creators allege that Runway got past them with descrambling tools “such as yt-dlp” and by rotating through IP addresses to avoid detection and blocking.

Businessing LLC, which runs the YouTube channel “Ali Spagnola,” says at least 1,200 of its videos were scraped; Ace Cam, which runs “Random Golf Club,” says at least 390.The PlaintiffsBusinessing is based in California and Ace Cam in Texas, according to the complaint. Random Golf Club filed the first suit on Feb. 18; the two cases were consolidated on March 27, and Runway moved to dismiss on May 27. They claim six kinds of harm, from lost advertising and YouTube Premium revenue to lost control of their works. The complaint also cites a 2024 report by 404 Media on a leaked internal Runway spreadsheet that, it says, listed about 3,968 YouTube channels and more than 100,000 videos.

Runway argued that public videos need no unlocking. YouTube, which “offers unfettered access to over a billion users a month,” is no “locked room,” its lawyers wrote. The measures, they argued, were at most controls on copying, which Section 1201(a) does not reach, and the creators could not invoke measures they had not put in place themselves.

Judge Kaplan rejected each argument, holding that YouTube’s measures, as the creators describe them, can be access controls even though anyone may watch its videos free, because every viewer passes through them. “The public nature of content that has been uploaded to YouTube does not render it unprotected because the public’s viewership of the content necessarily is subject to YouTube’s TPMs,” he wrote. Nothing in the statute, he added, quoting a 2017 appeals-court ruling, says a measure “cannot serve as both an access control and a use control.” And the law “does not state or imply that plaintiffs themselves must put in place the technological measures controlling access to their work”; it requires only that their work was subject to the measures circumvented, and the creators plausibly pleaded that they authorized YouTube to put them in place.

The public nature of content that has been uploaded to YouTube does not render it unprotected because the public’s viewership of the content necessarily is subject to YouTube’s TPMs.

The Stakes

The reasoning makes YouTube’s own defenses the creators’ case, and Runway argued that the theory would favor one company. YouTube’s terms of service, its brief said, reserve to YouTube and its affiliates, including Google, the right “to do anything they want with user-uploaded videos, AI training included.” “As Plaintiffs would have it, YouTube’s collection of billions of videos would continue to be used to train AI, but only by Google,” its lawyers wrote.

The exposure is counted per act. “Each act of circumvention constitutes a separate violation of §1201,” the complaint says, and the proposed class is all persons and entities whose YouTube videos Runway “accessed at the file level by scraping, downloading, or otherwise extracting underlying video files.”

Runway is not the only target. On Oct. 2 a federal judge in San Francisco, Jacqueline Scott Corley, refused to dismiss a suit against ByteDance that, the creators’ lawyers told Judge Kaplan, involves “the same claim and the same YouTube measures.” One of its two plaintiffs, Ted Entertainment, withdrew its claims on Oct. 27; the other, Matt Fisher, remains. Runway answered that the ruling addressed only one of the five measures. “ByteDance does not justify Plaintiffs’ attempt to convert § 1201’s narrow access control provision into a broad anti-scraping right of action,” its lawyers wrote.

Runway is also on the other side of the training fight: on Friday it joined Midjourney in a proposed friend-of-the-court brief supporting OpenAI’s and Microsoft’s motions for summary judgment in the OpenAI copyright cases in the same court.

As of early Monday the public docket showed no entry after the opinion, and no separate order setting a deadline for Runway’s answer or for a motion to certify the class.