Amazon has been hit with lawsuits from content creators who claim the company unfairly scraped YouTube videos to train Nova Reel, a generative artificial intelligence system meant to create videos from text prompts.
“Rather than asking permission or paying a fair price for the audiovisual content hosted on YouTube, Defendants have harvested content creators’ protected, copyrighted videos on a large scale for commercial purposes without consent or compensation to the content creators,” said Ted Entertainment (who runs YouTube channels including h3h3 Productions), Matt Fisher (who runs YouTube channels MrShortGame) Golfholics, which produces golf videos posted on Golf, makes the claims in a class action lawsuit filed in Seattle federal court late last week.
They claim Amazon circumvented digital locks to scrape YouTube videos and violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law prohibits people from circumventing technology that prevents the copying of digital media.
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“According to information and belief, the defendants used automated video download programs combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to evade detection and blocking, enabling unauthorized access and exfiltration of large amounts of video at the scale necessary for Nova Reel training,” the complaint alleges.
The complaint states that Amazon says it trains Nova Reel based on “selected data from a variety of sources, including proprietary licensed data, open source datasets, and optionally publicly available data.”
But the plaintiffs argue that even if the YouTube clips were publicly available, Amazon has no right to use them to train its models.
“The fact that a video can be accessed and viewed by the general public through a web browser does not mean that the video can be accessed, downloaded, extracted, and fed into commercial AI training pipelines,” the complaint alleges.
“Defendants cannot hide behind the word ‘public’ and launder what was in fact unauthorized mass unauthorized access and extraction of protected content.”
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment, but said the company does not discuss matters in ongoing litigation.
