IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS—Snapchat hacked videos from YouTube in order to build an AI database, lawsuit claims, (Jan 27, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The putative class action lawsuit was brought by the creators of videos, not the video platform itself.

A popular social media site and artificial intelligence developer engaged in “millions of individual downloads of protected YouTube content, all without authorization, all in violation of YouTube’s access restrictions, and all for the commercial purpose of building its artificial intelligence video,” a new federal complaint alleges. The lawsuit, brought by three named plaintiffs on behalf of proposed class of video creators nationwide, alleges that the developer bypassed YouTube’s security features in violation of the anti-circumvention features of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to exploit the videos without permission from the copyright owners (Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. Snap Inc., No. 2:26-cv-00754 (C.D. Cal. Jan. 23, 2026)).

The lawsuit takes aim at the corporate owner of Snapchat, the now-ubiquitous social media site that enables users to send pictures and video clips—“Snaps,” in the vernacular of the platform—that expire after a short period of time. The company has recently launched two new programs aimed at incorporating artificial intelligence technology. One, called Lenses, allows users to create and edit Snaps using text prompts alone. The other, called Spectacles, is an interactive eyewear product that promises, upon its projected launch later this year, to enable a form of augmented reality experiences for the wearer.

The principal named plaintiff in the lawsuit is the video production company operated by Ethan and Hila Klein, two social media personalities who rose to prominence through their YouTube channels “h3h3Productions” and “Ethan and Hila.” The two personalities, who started out by creating so-called “reaction videos” to other YouTube videos, now maintain, through their company Ted Entertainment, Inc., YouTube channels called The H3 Podcast and h3h3Productions. The creators of two popular golf-oriented YouTube channels, “Mr.ShortGame Golf” and “Golfholics,” round out the collection of named plaintiffs.

The lawsuit provides some detail about how Snapchat allegedly went about creating its database. YouTube allows the public to view audiovisual works only through controlled streaming and never provides access to the underlying video files, the complaint notes. Snapchat cracked YouTube’s anti-circumvention device in two ways, according to the named plaintiffs. First, Snapchat allegedly downloaded from a popular code-sharing platform a data set called HD-VILA-100M, which does not contain videos themselves but rather “video identifiers and timestamp boundaries” for approximately 100 million clips drawn from over three million unique YouTube videos. Second, Snapchat allegedly used the HD-VILA-100M dataset as “the foundation” for its own refined dataset known as Panda-70M, a collection of 3.8 million videos from YouTube split into approximately 70.7 million clips and paired with text captions.

The lawsuit is not the first to be brought by the creators of Ted Entertainment, a self-described “champion[]” of online free speech that, according to its complaint, “is currently helping define what reaction content does not constitute fair use to ensure YouTube content creators can enjoy the fruits of their labor.” IP Law covered a pair of such lawsuits, filed against Twitch broadcasters and Reddit moderators, in mid-2025.

The lawsuit is also not the first to raise the question of whether third parties, as opposed to only YouTube itself, can bring a DMCA claim based on circumvention of YouTube content-protection technology. One prominent judge in the Northern District of California, William H. Orrick, held early last year that such a claim was valid because “under the express language of the statute ‘[a]ny person’ that is injured by the conduct may bring an action” for an anti-circumvention violation.

The lawsuit proposes a class as follows: “All persons in the United States who uploaded original videos to YouTube and whose videos (or material portions thereof) were included in the HD-VILA-100M and Panda-70M datasets scraped and downloaded by Defendant.”

The Case is No. 2:26-cv-00754.

Attorneys: Rom Bar-Nissim (Heah Bar-Nissim LLP) for Ted Entertainment, Inc.

Companies: Ted Entertainment, Inc.; Snap Inc.

News: Copyright CaliforniaNews