Chmura v Snap Inc

Chmura v. Snap Inc.' is a class action lawsuit filed on February 18, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that Snapchat circumvented YouTube's technological protection measures to mass-download video content for AI training, violating the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.

Case Details

Field	Detail
Case Name	Chmura v. Snap Inc.
Court	U.S. District Court, Central District of California
Docket Number	2:26-cv-01732
Filed	February 18, 2026
Judge	Judge Andre Birotte Jr.
Plaintiff	Nicole Chmura (proposed class representative)
Defendant	Snap Inc.
Claims	DMCA anti-circumvention (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a))

Allegations

Plaintiff Nicole Chmura alleges that Snap Inc. circumvented YouTube's technological access controls to scrape, bulk-download, and extract YouTube-hosted audiovisual works at the file level for training Snapchat's AI systems.

Specific claims include:

• Snap used circumvention tools and services to defeat YouTube's streaming-only restrictions at scale
• The company instructed employees to evade detection and scrape repeatedly for video clips
• Snapchat's AI systems were trained on unlawfully accessed copyrighted content without creator permission or licenses
• The circumvention was conducted deliberately and systematically to obtain commercial AI training data

Relief Sought

• Injunctive relief to cease circumvention-based access to YouTube-hosted works
• Statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 1203
• Declaratory relief
• Jury trial

Significance

This case is part of a wave of DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuits filed against AI companies in early 2026, alongside similar actions against Runway AI, Meta, Nvidia, and others. It represents an expansion of AI copyright litigation beyond text-based training data into video content scraping.

See Also

• Businessing LLC v Runway AI Inc
• Ted Entertainment v OpenAI Inc
• Ted Entertainment v Apple Inc
• Ted Entertainment v Amazoncom Inc