The owners of YouTube channels h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple in federal court in California. The lawsuit alleges that the company violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by illegally accessing and extracting millions of YouTube videos to train its artificial intelligence models.
According to the complaint, Apple allegedly intentionally circumvented YouTube’s protections meant to prevent large-scale scraping of content for use in generative AI tools.
YouTubers accuse Apple of using their videos in AI without permission
The plaintiffs accuse Apple of circumventing YouTube’s protections by harvesting content from channels and using it to train its own AI systems.
The lawsuit also claims that Apple’s own published research documents confirm that content uploaded by these YouTubers was used to train Apple’s systems.
Creators believe Apple’s actions are an attack on the creator community, as the company is said to have used their work for free and without compensation in order to develop its own AI technology and make money from it.
For this reason, they are seeking injunctions and damages, both individually and on behalf of other affected creators across the United States, to prevent future unauthorized use of their works by Apple and other companies.
