YouTuber sues Runway AI in latest copyright class action over AI training

Artificial intelligence video startup Runway AI has been hit with a ​proposed class action lawsuit in California federal court for ‌allegedly misusing YouTube content to train its video ​generation platform. YouTube creator David Gardner said ⁠in the complaint, filed in Los Angeles on Monday, that Runway bypassed YouTube’s copyright protections to illegally download user ‌videos for its AI training.

Gardner, who lives in Los Angeles County, accused Runway ‌of violating YouTube’s terms of service and California’s ‌unfair competition ⁠law. The lawsuit, which seeks an unspecified ⁠amount of monetary damages, is one of dozens of copyright cases brought by authors, visual artists and other creators against ​tech companies over their ‌AI training. Other YouTubers have brought similar ongoing lawsuits against OpenAI, Nvidia, Snap, Meta and ByteDance.

Spokespeople for Runway did not immediately respond to ‌a request for comment on the complaint on ​Tuesday, nor did Gardner and his attorneys. A spokesperson for YouTube’s parent company Google, ⁠which is not directly involved in the case, also did not immediately respond to a request ‌for comment. New York-based Runway has been valued at over $5.3 billion following rounds of funding from SoftBank, Nvidia and others.

The lawsuit said that Runway utilised data-scraping tools to download YouTube videos unlawfully and used the content without permission to teach ‌its generative AI systems how to respond to human prompts.

Gardner ​asked the court for permission to represent a larger group of rightsholders whose YouTube ⁠videos were allegedly scraped by Runway.