What the court ordered
Document 61 is an Order Denying Motion to Dismiss, filed October 9, 2026, in No. 3:26-cv-02936-RS, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (12 pages), signed by United States District Judge Richard Seeborg. The order states that Apple's motion to dismiss is denied. (Order pp. 1, 12.)
The plaintiffs are Ted Entertainment, Inc. and Matt Fisher, suing on behalf of themselves and a putative class of content creators who upload videos to YouTube. The defendant is Apple Inc. The order describes the claim as alleging that Apple circumvented technological protection measures to scrape copyrighted videos from YouTube in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. 1201. For the motion, the order accepts well-pled factual allegations in the complaint as true. (Order pp. 1 to 2.)
What the order says about the claim
As framed by the order, the amended complaint alleges that Apple used the public HD-VILA-100M dataset to build its own Panda-70M dataset, used those datasets to locate, access, and download millions of underlying YouTube videos outside YouTube's authorized playback environment, and relied on methods including yt-dlp, IP rotation, regenerated links, and spoofed or reused proof-of-origin tokens, and that YouTube's measures include a rolling cipher, session-bound short-lived URLs, CAPTCHA challenges, proof-of-origin tokens, and IP blocking and rate limiting. (Order pp. 2 to 3.)
Apple argued that YouTube's measures are use controls under 17 U.S.C. 1201(b) rather than access controls under 1201(a), that they do not operate in the ordinary course, and that Apple's alleged conduct was not "circumvention" under 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(3)(A). The court rejected each argument at the pleading stage. It held that the inquiry is whether the measures provide some degree of control over access, citing MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., 629 F.3d 928, 954 n.17 (9th Cir. 2010), and that a measure can be both an access control and a use control under Disney Enterprises v. VidAngel, Inc., 869 F.3d 848, 864 (9th Cir. 2017). It found the plaintiffs' allegations sufficient to treat YouTube's measures as access controls within 1201(a). (Order pp. 4 to 7.)
On ordinary course, the court compared authorized YouTube playback to using an authorized DVD player and held that the ability to obtain unencrypted video outside that channel does not place the measures outside 17 U.S.C. 1201(a)(3)(B). On circumvention, it held that the 1201(a)(3)(A) definition is unambiguous and that the allegation Apple used yt-dlp or an equivalent to descramble the rolling cipher alone overcomes the motion; it also found the alleged IP rotation, regenerated links, and token spoofing or reuse sufficient under Apple's narrower reading. (Order pp. 7 to 11.)