News Ali Spagnola v Runway AI YouTube Scraping 2026

YouTuber and musician Ali Spagnola, through her company Businessing LLC, has filed a class action lawsuit against Runway AI, Inc. in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for allegedly circumventing YouTube's technological protection measures to scrape over 1,200 copyrighted videos for AI training.<ref>Mishcon de Reya - AI IP Policy Tracker</ref><ref>Businessing LLC v. Runway AI, Inc. - Complaint</ref><ref>Law360: Another YouTuber Sues Runway AI</ref>

Background

Ali Spagnola operates the YouTube channel @alispagnola, which has over 2.59 million subscribers and millions of views across comedy, music, and fitness content.<ref>Law360: Another YouTuber Sues Runway AI</ref> She filed suit on February 27, 2026, alleging Runway AI deliberately bypassed YouTube's technical measures protecting her videos from unauthorized downloading.

Allegations

DMCA Anti-Circumvention

The complaint centers on Section 1201(a)(1) of the DMCA, which prohibits circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) controlling access to copyrighted works. YouTube employs rate limiting, IP blocking, and Terms of Service restrictions to prevent bulk downloading of videos.<ref>Businessing LLC v. Runway AI, Inc. - Complaint</ref>

Plaintiff alleges Runway used rotating IP addresses, virtual machines, and automated tools to circumvent these protections and mass-download millions of copyrighted videos, including over 1,200 of Spagnola's.<ref>Businessing LLC v. Runway AI, Inc. - Complaint</ref>

Class Action Scope

The case is filed as a class action on behalf of "independent YouTube content creators whose videos were scraped by Runway AI," seeking remedies for the entire class of affected creators.<ref>Businessing LLC v. Runway AI, Inc. - Complaint</ref>

Related Litigation

The Businessing LLC suit joins a cluster of similar DMCA cases targeting Runway AI for YouTube scraping:

Ace Cam, Inc. v. Runway AI, Inc. -- Filed February 18, 2026 in SDNY<ref>Businessing LLC v. Runway AI, Inc. - Complaint</ref>
David Vance Gardner v. Runway AI, Inc. -- Filed February 23, 2026<ref>Law360: Another YouTuber Sues Runway AI</ref>

Similar DMCA claims have also been filed against other major AI companies, including Ted Entertainment's case against OpenAI, Apple, and Amazon.<ref>Copyright Alliance - Copyright Stories February 2026</ref>

Legal Significance

The case exemplifies the emerging legal theory that using circumvention methods to acquire training data--rather than traditional copyright infringement of the use itself--may avoid some fair use defenses while exposing AI companies to DMCA statutory damages.<ref>Copyright Alliance - Copyright Stories February 2026</ref>

The litigation highlights the growing tension between:

AI companies' reliance on publicly available web content for model training
Content creators' rights under anti-circumvention laws
Platform terms of service as a potential basis for liability

References