YouTubers sue Apple for scraping videos to train AI models
Three YouTube content creators filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging the company illegally scraped millions of copyrighted videos from their channels without permission to train its AI models. The plaintiffs claim Apple violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by circumventing YouTube's protection systems and benefited financially without compensating the creators.
What happened
Three YouTube channel owners—h3h3 Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics—filed a class action lawsuit in California's Northern District against Apple, alleging the company violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by scraping copyrighted videos from their channels to train AI models.
The plaintiffs claim Apple used automated video-downloading programs to circumvent YouTube's controlled streaming architecture and protection systems. The lawsuit alleges that Apple trained Apple AI Video on Panda-70M, a dataset of 70 million videos that the plaintiffs claim contains their copyrighted material, which Apple publicly disclosed in a peer-reviewed academic paper authored by its own researchers.
Reported impact
The plaintiffs claim that Apple profited substantially from the videos while providing no compensation to content creators.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.