YouTube Creators Sue Amazon and Apple Over Alleged AI Training Data Scraping

Source Domain: www.fakta.co

Prominent YouTube channels have initiated legal action against tech giants Amazon and Apple, alleging that both companies unlawfully accessed and scraped millions of copyrighted videos from YouTube. These actions, they claim, were undertaken to train the companies’ respective artificial intelligence (AI) models. The lawsuits highlight a growing contention over the use of creators’ content in the burgeoning generative AI industry without explicit permission or compensation.

A proposed class action lawsuit was filed last week in California federal court against Apple by the owners of h3h3Productions (encompassing H3 Podcast and H3 Podcast Highlights), MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics. The plaintiffs contend that Apple “deliberately circumvented” YouTube’s safeguards against video scraping, subsequently profiting “substantially” from these illicit activities, as reported by macrumors.com.

Apple’s research papers, according to the complaint, reportedly show that some of the plaintiffs’ YouTube videos were indeed utilized in the training of its AI models. The lawsuit characterizes Apple’s alleged actions as “not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multi-trillion-dollar generative AI industry without any compensation.” The creators are seeking both an injunction and damages for themselves and other similarly situated individuals across the U.S.

Concurrently, Amazon faces a similar class action lawsuit in federal court in Seattle, filed by the same YouTube creators. This complaint, originally filed on Friday, accuses Amazon of scraping millions of YouTube videos without authorization to train its Nova Reel video AI model, according to king5.com and cnet.com. The lawsuit,…

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