Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. Snap Inc.

On 23 January 2026, Ted Entertainment, Inc., Matt Fisher, and Golfholics, Inc. commenced class action proceedings against Snap Inc. in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Complaint asserts that Snap deliberately circumvented YouTube's technological protection measures to access and scrape millions of copyrighted videos, including theirs, contending that this conduct was undertaken to feed, train, and commercialise a large-scale generative artificial intelligence model. According to the pleadings, Snap deployed video-downloading programmes combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to evade YouTube's access protections and detection systems, enabling the defendant to harvest protected audiovisual content at scale without authorisation or compensation.

The claim further alleges that this scraped content was utilised to develop Snap's "text to video" AI system, which now forms a core feature within products offered to users, including the "Imagine Lens" functionality.

Claims advanced include circumvention of technological measures under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The Plaintiffs primarily seek a declaration that Defendant has wilfully circumvented the copyright protection systems of YouTube intended to protect Plaintiffs’ and the Class Members’s audiovisual content, followed by statutory damages and any equitable relief necessary to prevent further copyright infringement.