Three established YouTube channels have sued Apple, alleging that the company violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by unlawfully accessing and scraping millions of copyrighted videos from YouTube to train its AI models.
In a class action lawsuit filed in California federal court last week, the owners of the YouTube channels h3h3Productions (plus H3 Podcast and H3 Podcast Highlights), MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics allege that Apple "deliberately circumvented" YouTube's protections against video scraping and "profited substantially" by doing so.
Apple's research papers indicate that some of the YouTube videos uploaded by the plaintiffs were used to train its AI models, the complaint alleges.
Apple's actions were "not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multi-trillion-dollar generative AI industry without any compensation," the lawsuit adds.
The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction and damages individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated in the U.S., per the complaint.
In recent months, the same three YouTube channels have filed similar lawsuits against other tech giants, including Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance, and Snap.
h3h3Productions is a well-known YouTube channel created by Ethan Klein and Hila Klein, and they later created the H3 Podcast. Their channels have millions of followers, while MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics have hundreds of thousands of followers.
