Three YouTube Creators Sue Apple for DMCA Violations

Three prominent YouTube creators filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple on April 3 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing the company of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by bypassing YouTube's anti-scraping protections to download millions of copyrighted videos for training its artificial intelligence models.

The plaintiffs, including Ted Entertainment, which operates the h3h3Productions channel with 2.6 million subscribers, along with golf-focused channels MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics, claim Apple unlawfully accessed their content without permission, payment, or attribution. According to the lawsuit, the creators' videos appear extensively in a dataset called Panda70M, referenced in a late-2024 research paper by Apple engineers on scalable text- and image-conditioned video generation, known as STIV. Panda70M consists of an index of approximately 70 million YouTube clips, organized by URLs, video identifiers, and timestamps. While the dataset itself serves as a map to the videos, the suit alleges that extracting and using the clips required repeated circumvention of YouTube's safeguards, such as its controlled...