ByteDance's motion to dismiss the YouTubers' scraping suit is granted in part and denied in part — core DMCA claims proceed

What happened

On 2 October 2026, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on ByteDance's motion to dismiss in *Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. ByteDance Inc.*, Case No. 3:25-cv-10933-JSC (Order on Motion to Dismiss, ECF No. 55). The motion was granted without prejudice in part and denied in part.

The claims that survive are the DMCA § 1201 circumvention and trafficking claims insofar as they rest on measures the court treated as effectively controlling access — including YouTube's signature cipher and session tokens, and the access controls on the repositories hosting the HD-VILA-100M dataset. The theories dismissed (with leave to amend) are the § 1201 theories premised on measures that restrict use or copying rather than access, and the trafficking claim based on the "Blogger" downloading tool, which the court found insufficiently alleged as distributed by ByteDance for circumvention. An amended complaint is due by 30 October 2026.

Background

Ted Entertainment and fellow YouTube creators brought this putative class action on 23 December 2025. They allege ByteDance circumvented YouTube's technological measures and used IP-rotating virtual machines to scrape and download millions of creators' videos — including videos identified in the HD-VILA-100M and WebVid datasets — to train and commercialise its MagicVideo generative AI. The claim is brought under DMCA § 1201.

Why it may matter to you

If your videos were published on YouTube and appear in the datasets named in the complaint, the core of the creators' circumvention case will now proceed past the pleading stage. The ruling also draws a line other scraping cases are likely to cite: access controls can ground a § 1201 claim; measures that only restrict use or copying may not.

What is not yet known

Whether the plaintiffs' amended complaint (due 30 October 2026) revives the dismissed theories, and whether the surviving claims withstand summary judgment. The allegations themselves have not been proven.