TED Entertainment voluntarily dismisses Apple YouTube-scraping suit weeks after surviving dismissal bid

What happened

A notice of voluntary dismissal was filed on 27 October 2026 in TED Entertainment, Inc. v. Apple Inc., No. 3:26-cv-02936-RS (U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California), the proposed class action alleging Apple scraped copyrighted YouTube videos to train a generative text-to-video AI model. Open Class Actions reported the filing in an update dated 30 October 2026, noting the dismissal document itself was not yet publicly available at that time. No settlement has been reported.

Background

The suit was filed on 3 April 2026 by TED Entertainment, Inc. (the company behind the h3h3 Productions and H3 Podcast YouTube channels), Matt Fisher and Golfholics, Inc., alleging Apple violated the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision (17 U.S.C. § 1201) by bypassing YouTube's technological protection measures to harvest videos into the Panda-70M dataset (roughly 70 million video-caption pairs derived from about 3.8 million YouTube videos) to train its text-to-video model. On 9 October 2026 Judge Richard Seeborg denied Apple's motion to dismiss, holding the amended complaint adequately alleged circumvention of YouTube's access controls. The dismissal notice followed eighteen days later.

What this is not

The dismissal is not a ruling on the merits: the allegations were never decided, and Apple has not been found liable. Whether the notice dismisses the whole action or only particular plaintiffs' claims is unconfirmed, because the document was not publicly available as of 30 October. This is distinct from the parallel Nvidia suit, where TED Entertainment dropped its claims while Matt Fisher's case continued (already published).