Apple in trouble with YouTube channels over AI training – class action lawsuit
Several YouTubers have filed a lawsuit against Apple in a US court. The company stated in a paper that it uses videos for AI training.
YouTube logo on a building facade.
(Image: Claudio Divizia / Shutterstock.com)
A research paper by Apple's AI research team has led to legal consequences for the iPhone manufacturer: Several operators of YouTube channels have now filed a class action lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, alleging that Apple illegally used their content for model training. The evidence for this comes from Apple itself, as according to the plaintiffs, the research papers suggest that their videos were used.
Class action lawsuit could include more plaintiffs
According to court documents published by Macrumors here, the well-known H3 podcast, in the form of its production company h3h3Productions, is suing, among others. Several golf channels, including Golfholics, are also parties to the lawsuit. As is common with class action lawsuits, other affected parties can join – or benefit from a potential payout later if Apple is convicted in civil court.
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According to the lawsuit, Apple allegedly “illegally accessed millions of copyrighted videos from YouTube” to use them for training AI models through scraping. Apple allegedly circumvented YouTube's protection against such attempts and also profited “substantially” from the scraping. All of this is a violation of the US Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Panda-70M used by Apple
Specifically, Apple is being sued, among other things, because the company allegedly illegally circumvented the protective measures provided for in the DMCA. However, it remains unclear whether this actually happened directly. The plaintiffs argue, among other things, that Apple admitted in its research papers to using the Panda-70M dataset for training. According to the plaintiffs, this dataset in turn contains “millions of YouTube videos” obtained by circumventing protective measures.
So far, Apple does not offer a commercially accessible video generator; it only researches in this area and publishes corresponding papers. It remains unclear whether this will be sufficient to fend off the lawsuit. The use of copyrighted material from the internet for training AI models has been a known problem for years. Numerous lawsuits are ongoing worldwide. Numerous lawsuits are ongoing worldwide. Most recently, OpenAI launched its own video generator Sora, even though the company had previously entered into agreements with Disney, among others, to use its copyright material. The technology is very demanding in terms of computing power, and OpenAI apparently saw no possibility of refinancing here.
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