Apple's argument appears in a broader wave of litigation over whether AI companies violated the DMCA by allegedly scraping YouTube videos or other online content for AI training .
The available sources show a recurring defense theme: defendants argue that publicly streamed or publicly viewable YouTube videos are not protected by DMCA access-control provisions merely because YouTube has technical limits on scraping or downloading .
This is an important test of whether DMCA anti-circumvention claims can apply to publicly viewable online videos that are allegedly protected by technical anti-scraping or anti-download measures . If courts accept Apple's and Snap's theory, the DMCA access-control claim would be harder to use against AI-training practices involving publicly viewable YouTube videos
. If courts accept the plaintiffs' theory, then bypassing YouTube's technical restrictions to scrape public videos could potentially support DMCA liability in this type of AI-training case
.