A group of independent musicians and songwriters is taking Google to court over allegations that the company scraped roughly 44 million audio clips from YouTube to train its Lyria 3 music-generation model. That’s approximately 280,000 hours of music, used without compensation or consent from the people who made it.
Google’s response? You already agreed to this when you uploaded your video. The company filed a motion to dismiss on June 10, citing YouTube’s terms of service as a binding license.
The terms of service defense
The lawsuit was filed on March 6, 2026, in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The plaintiffs claim straightforward copyright infringement: Google took their creative work, fed it into a machine learning model, and never asked or paid.
YouTube’s terms of service do grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, and process uploaded content. The critical question is whether “process” stretches far enough to encompass training a generative AI model that can produce competing music.
