IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS—C.D. Cal.: YouTube content creators file class action lawsuit against Snapchat for mass downloading, (Feb 20, 2026)

By Kevin M. Finson, J.D.

The complaint alleges that Snapchat circumvented YouTube’s technological measures to control access by preventing the download of file-level copies at scale in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

In a claim over the rights of audiovisual content on YouTube, Nicole Chmura (Chmura), a YouTube content creator, brought suit on behalf of herself and others similarly situated against Snap, Inc. (Snapchat) in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Chmura alleged that Snapchat circumvented YouTube’s technological measures in order to scrape a huge number of videos from the YouTube website for the purpose of training its artificial intelligence products (Chmura v. Snap Inc., No. 2:26-cv-01732 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 18, 2026)).

Chmura is the owner of and operator of the YouTube Channel “Let’s Go Team” in which she documents her personal travel experiences. Chmura alleged that Snapchat obtained at least one video from her channel as a part of the dataset “HD-VILA-100M,” used by Snapchat to train its AI video-learning architecture. She and other class Members derive value from their works through viewership, advertising, sponsorships, licensing, and other monetization that depends on controlled distribution and the ability to choose whether, when, and how their Works will be licensed for downstream uses, including AI model training.

Chmura alleges that her works, among others, were uploaded to YouTube subject to YouTube’s terms of use and technological measures which prevented viewers from obtaining the actual media files: viewers could watch the videos subject to ads as applicable but could not download a copy for themselves. Snapchat, however, allegedly used third-party tools such as the YouTube downloader “yt-dlp” to obtain file-level access on a large scale. Snapchat is accused of obtaining these files for financial gain by using them to train its commercial AI systems. The content creators making up the putative class had not consented to such use and were not compensated for such use.

Chmura requests that the case continue as a class action and seeks declarative relief, injunctive relief, statutory damages, and attorneys’ fees.

The Case is No. 2:26-cv-01732.

Attorneys: William J. Edelman (Milberg, PLLC) for Nicole Chmura.

Companies: Snap Inc.

Cases: AINews Copyright TechnologyInternet CaliforniaNews