YouTube creators sue ByteDance, alleging it scraped millions of videos to train its MagicVideo model

What happened

On 23 December 2025, Ted Entertainment, Inc. (the company behind the h3h3 Productions channels), Matt Fisher and Golfholics, Inc. filed a class action complaint against ByteDance Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Case No. 3:25-cv-10933-JSC). The plaintiffs are YouTube creators suing on behalf of a proposed class of creators whose videos were allegedly scraped.

The complaint alleges that ByteDance circumvented YouTube's technological protection measures — using a video-downloading program together with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to avoid detection — to download millions of videos and use them to feed, train, improve and commercialise its text-to-video model MagicVideo. It names the datasets HD-VILA-100M and WebVid-10M, plus what it calls 7 million self-collected video-text samples. The claim is brought under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a), rather than as a straightforward copyright infringement claim, in part because many YouTube videos are not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Why it may matter to you

If you publish video on YouTube, the complaint alleges your work could be inside these video datasets even though YouTube only offers streaming access and does not provide the underlying files. The case tests whether breaking through a platform's access controls to gather training data is itself actionable for the creators whose work was taken, separate from whether training is fair use.

What is not yet known

The allegations have not been proven and the class has not been certified. A related development — a September 2026 hearing at which Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley signalled ByteDance's motion to dismiss was unlikely to succeed — is covered in a separate item on this site. No ruling on the merits has been issued.