A group of YouTube creators is suing Amazon, accusing the tech giant of secretly scraping their videos without their permission to train an AI video model.
A proposed class action lawsuit filed in federal court in Seattle alleges that Amazon used automated tools to download and extract data from millions of YouTube videos to build and improve its Nova Reel generation AI system, a model that can create short videos from text prompts and images.
The complaint centers on how that data was obtained. The plaintiffs allege that Amazon circumvented YouTube’s protections by using virtual machines and IP address rotation to avoid detection, effectively circumventing the platform’s safeguards against bulk downloads.
The lawsuit was filed by several creators, including Ted Entertainment (the company behind H3 Podcasts and h3h3 Productions), as well as individual YouTubers and channel operators. They claim that the alleged scraping violates copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and are seeking damages and an injunction to stop the practice.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
The case comes at a pivotal moment for generative AI, as courts consider whether training on copyrighted material constitutes fair use and how much control creators retain after their work is used to build these systems. While the debate often centers on documents that have been at the center of the AI revolution in recent years, AI video generators such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo have only recently emerged.
This case is one of dozens testing the limits of AI training practices, along with high-profile lawsuits by writers, artists, and media outlets, including those against OpenAI and Meta, all of which revolve around the same unanswered question: “Where does fair use end and where does infringement begin?”
