Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 91334, member: 2178"] On August 18, 2026, a Massachusetts federal judge allowed record labels to add a DMCA claim accusing Suno of bypassing YouTube’s rolling cipher. Two days later, the same judge let a similar anti-circumvention claim survive Suno’s motion to dismiss in a separate artist-led case. Neither ruling found Suno liable. That distinction matters because Section 1201 does not simply punish scraping. It prohibits bypassing a technological measure that effectively controls access to copyrighted work, so courts must examine what the barrier does and how the defendant got around it. A site rule against automated collection is not automatically enough. That is the sharper legal issue behind [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/gerencia-360-sues-suno-bright-data-in-california.76732/unread']Gerencia 360’s anti-circumvention allegations[/URL][/B]. Gerencia alleges that Suno and Bright Data got around authentication gates, subscription paywalls, rate limits, CAPTCHAs, and other restrictions while obtaining recordings and lyrics. Those alleged barriers do not all satisfy the same legal test. [HEADING=2]YouTube’s rolling cipher has survived early challenges[/HEADING] The August 18 ruling focused on YouTube’s rolling cipher, not scraping in the abstract. The labels alleged that YouTube keeps a public page URL while hiding the file URL containing the audiovisual file, with that location protected by a changing cipher. They further alleged that Suno used YT-DL and YT-DLP to obtain the audio files directly. Suno argued that the cipher restricts copying rather than access. Anyone can open YouTube and stream the music, its argument goes, so the work is accessible without defeating the cipher. Section 1201 treats access controls differently from measures aimed only at restricting copying, making that classification important. The judge did not settle the classification. He held that the labels had plausibly alleged circumvention and said the technical question required a developed factual record about how the cipher, player, file URL, and downloading tools operate. The August 20 ruling carried that reasoning into the artist case. That is a meaningful procedural win, but still an early one. A surviving claim means the allegations are legally sufficient to continue, not that plaintiffs have proved YouTube’s cipher qualifies as an access control or that Suno unlawfully bypassed it. [HEADING=2]California law gives access controls real bite[/HEADING] Gerencia filed in California, where Ninth Circuit precedent gives its theory another dimension. In MDY Industries v. Blizzard Entertainment, the appeals court treated Section 1201 as creating an anti-circumvention right distinct from ordinary copyright infringement. A plaintiff therefore need not always prove that obtaining access was itself copyright infringement before pursuing an access-control theory. The Ninth Circuit also dealt with mixed-purpose protection in Disney Enterprises v. VidAngel. VidAngel lawfully bought DVDs and Blu-rays but used different software to decrypt them and make digital copies. The court rejected the idea that a measure stops being an access control merely because consumers have another authorized way to view the work. That precedent matters to the [B]technical access-control test[/B] surrounding streamed music. Free playback through an authorized player does not automatically establish that every route to the underlying media file is authorized. The focus can shift from whether a listener may hear the song to whether a particular process must be used to reach the protected file. There is a limit. MDY also recognized that a measure may fail as an effective access control when the same copyrighted material remains readily reachable through another route that never encounters the measure. Suno can still argue that YouTube leaves the protected work openly accessible and that its cipher merely restricts downloading. [HEADING=2]Scraping barriers do not all mean the same thing[/HEADING] Gerencia’s list of alleged defenses becomes more interesting when separated by function. California courts have treated CAPTCHA systems as potential Section 1201 access controls when solving the challenge is required before a user or bot can reach copyrighted pages. Defeating an actual CAPTCHA gate is therefore different from simply ignoring a website owner’s preference. Robots.txt is the clearest example. In a 2025 federal scraping case, a court rejected a Section 1201 theory based on robots.txt because the file merely instructed crawlers not to enter certain areas. A crawler could disregard the instruction without defeating a mechanism that actually blocked access. Rate limits can present the same factual problem. Exceeding a requested pace, rotating an IP address, or changing proxies may show efforts to avoid detection, but Section 1201 still asks whether a technological measure stood between the scraper and the copyrighted work. The system’s operation matters more than its label. Paywalls and authentication gates can be stronger candidates when access genuinely requires credentials, payment, tokens, or another authorized process. Even then, using valid credentials without permission is not always the same as bypassing the technical measure itself. Courts have distinguished using an authorized process improperly from avoiding or disabling that process. Gerencia will therefore need more than an inventory of anti-bot defenses. Evidence showing which works sat behind which measures, how those measures operated, what Suno or Bright Data did to defeat them, and whether an authorized process was technically required could determine which alleged scraping acts fit Section 1201 and which belong under different legal theories. [/QUOTE]

Name