As seen for the first time, three YouTube channels have come together to file a class action lawsuit against Apple macrumors. According to the lawsuit, h3h3 Productions, the makers of MrShortGameGolf and Golfaholics, accuse Apple of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by scraping copyrighted videos on YouTube to train its AI models.
While YouTubers’ videos are available to watch on the platform, the lawsuit alleged that Apple illegally circumvented the “controlled streaming architecture” to which regular users are limited. The creators claimed that Apple’s video scraping was used to train its generative AI products, adding that the tech giant’s “huge financial success would not have been possible without the video content created by YouTubers”. macrumors It noted that these YouTube channels have also filed similar lawsuits against other tech companies, including Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance, and Snap.
This isn’t the first time that a company’s alleged AI training methods have landed them in legal trouble. Both OpenAI and Microsoft were accused of using copyrighted NYTimes articles to train their AI chatbots. Similarly, Perplexity was recently sued by Reddit and Encyclopædia Britannica for alleged copyright and trademark infringement. Last year, Apple was also named in a separate class action lawsuit by two neuroscience professors who claimed their copyrighted works were used without permission. We’ve contacted Apple for comment and will update the story when we hear back.
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