YouTube channels including H3H3 sue Apple over use of videos to train AI

Three YouTuber channel owners are taking Apple to court over alleged circumvention of YouTube's copyright protection systems. 

The owners of the YouTube channels h3h3Productions (perhaps best known for the H3 Podcast), MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics filed civil suit against Apple. The suit claims Apple violated both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and YouTube's copyright protection systems to scrape videos from the plaintiff's YouTube channels (among millions of others) in an effort to train its AI models.

The suit, which was filed in California's Northern District, goes on to claim that Apple "published a peer-reviewed academic paper authored by its own researchers publicly disclosing that it trained Apple AI Video on Panda-70M," a massive dataset of 70 million videos the plaintiff alleges contains some of their copyrighted material.

The suit also alleges that Apple used "automated video-downloading programs" (i.e., video scrapers) to download content from YouTube while avoiding the site's protection measures. The plaintiff's claim these actions resulted in Apple "profiting substantially" off the videos while granting no compensation to content creators. 

The group of YouTubers suing Apple are seeking damages related to the case; additionally, they are seeking an injunction against Apple concerning the scraping of YouTube videos. This would effectively block Apple from using YouTube as a source for training its AI models.

The full filing can be viewed via the link below.