Beaulier v. Roblox: court dismisses DMCA section 1202 claims over AI training data, with leave to amend

What the order did

The case is Beaulier v. Roblox Corporation, No. 5:26-cv-02642-BLF, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. The order (ECF No. 47) grants Roblox's motion to dismiss Count I, under 17 U.S.C. 1202(b)(1), and Count II, under 17 U.S.C. 1202(b)(3), each with leave to amend. Any amended complaint is due within 30 days of the order. Leave is limited to the defects the order addresses, and no parties or claims may be added without the court's prior leave. (Order at 15.)

What the complaint alleged, as the order describes it

According to the order, Beaulier makes 3D models for a living, has published over four hundred of them on Sketchfab, and manually applied Sketchfab's NoAI tag to each of them. The complaint alleges that Roblox used datasets such as Objaverse-XL to identify and obtain copies of 3D models, and that Roblox removed the copyright management information (CMI) that accompanied the works when it ran the copies through preprocessing pipelines to train its generative AI systems. (Order at 1 to 3.)

The court's reasoning

On removal, the court said the factual allegations amounted to little more than conclusory assertions that the works had CMI before preprocessing and did not after, and that the described operations supported an alternative account in which Roblox passively failed to preserve CMI. (Order at 7 to 9.) On intent, the court rejected Roblox's proposed rule that intent requires a process targeted at removing CMI, but said that pleadings that merely establish a uniform process, or a process in which removal is a side effect, are insufficient to plead intentional removal. It found the complaint fell short because it also contains allegations in tension with intentional removal, for example that removal is an "inherent consequence" of training generative AI models on large-scale creative datasets. (Order at 10 to 11.) On Count II, the court said internal use is not distribution and called the complaint's statement about distribution through Roblox's AI platform conclusory. (Order at 14.)

The order also resolved several issues for Beaulier. It found that he met his pleading burden on standing, that he adequately pled the NoAI tag is CMI as a term or condition for use of the work under 17 U.S.C. 1202(c)(6), and that his allegations were collectively sufficient to plead that Roblox knew or had reasonable grounds to know its conduct would enable violations of the license terms accompanying his works. (Order at 4 to 5, 9 to 10, 12 to 13.) The court granted leave to amend in part because the parties had not had the opportunity to address the Ninth Circuit's decision in Doe 1 v. GitHub in their briefing. (Order at 13, 15.) A footnote notes that a substantially similar complaint by Beaulier against Meta Platforms, Inc. was dismissed with leave to amend on August 26, 2026. (Order at 1 n.1.)