Plaintiff record companies sued defendant Udio, an AI music generation platform that allows users to create songs from text prompts and audio inputs. Plaintiffs alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act based on assertions that defendant – by using stream ripping tools such as YT-DLP – circumvented technological protections to copy copyrighted music from YouTube and use that music to train its models.

Defendant asked the court to dismiss the DMCA anticircumvention claim, arguing that plaintiffs failed to plausibly allege that YouTube’s technological measures qualified as protected access controls under the statute or that defendant’s conduct constituted unlawful circumvention.

The court denied the motion. It held that plaintiffs plausibly alleged that YouTube employs technological measures that control access to copyrighted works and that defendant circumvented those measures, and the court held that the technical classification of those measures could not be resolved without a more developed factual record.

Sony Music Entertainment v. Uncharted Labs, Inc., 2026 WL 1019199 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 15, 2026)