Apple is fighting back against a class-action lawsuit from several YouTube creators who claim the company illegally scraped their videos to help train AI models. The lawsuit is one of the latest entries in a rapidly expanding legal pile surrounding generative AI training data. The lawsuit says that while the tech giants continue to argue that public web content is fair game, creators are increasingly asking who authorized their content to be acquired in the first place.
The lawsuit was filed in April in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics owners Ted Entertainment, Matt Fisher, and Golfholics. The creators allege that Apple circumvented YouTube’s anti-scraping protections to access and download copyrighted videos at scale. Their complaint frames the alleged scraping as part of a larger AI land grab, in which content created by creators is fed into powerful commercial systems without friendly door-knocks like payments or licenses.
Apple’s new motion to dismiss takes a completely different view. Apple says the lawsuit attempts to turn YouTube’s rules against scraping into a DMCA access control claim, and that’s where the whole thing breaks down, the company says. Apple insists that creators can upload their videos to YouTube and the public can freely view them. “No password. No payment. No lock. No key.” This phrase appears directly in Apple’s filing and nicely sums up the company’s defense.
The primary legal battle focuses on Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which covers circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Apple said that while YouTube’s technical barriers may limit how someone can use or download videos, they do not block access to the videos themselves. Simply put, Apple claims that watching videos on YouTube’s public page is not the same as breaking open a locked digital vault.
Apple also focuses on the distinction between access and use. The company likens true access control to a black box that prevents anyone from seeing what’s inside. In other words, even though YouTube has rules and tools to restrict downloads, Apple treats YouTube as a public domain rather than a locked vault.
mcroomers We first reported on Apple’s response, noting that the same YouTube channel owner has filed similar lawsuits against Meta, NVIDIA, ByteDance, and Snap. This extensive litigation push makes it clear that this is not just an Apple problem. This is a problem in the AI industry that will never go away because one company is proudly saying “public means public” as a lawyer.
For now, Apple wants the courts to preemptively dismiss the suit or invalidate some of its requests for relief related to copyright infringement claims, rather than workarounds. No judge has yet ruled on the allegations, and the case has not been certified as a class action.
