Three YouTube content creators have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of using videos from their channels to train artificial intelligence models without permission.
The owners of the h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics channels filed the lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California, alleging that Apple bypassed YouTube’s copyright protection systems, in an attempt to collect video clips from their channels, along with millions of other clips, for use in training artificial intelligence models.
The lawsuit indicates that Apple published an academic research paper in which it mentioned training the Apple AI Video model using a huge data set called Panda-70M, which includes about 70 million video clips. The plaintiffs assert that this collection contains copyrighted content belonging to them.
The lawsuit also accuses Apple of using automated download programs to collect videos from YouTube, while bypassing the platform’s protection mechanisms. According to the allegations, this allowed the company to financially benefit from these clips without providing any compensation to the content creators.
The plaintiffs are seeking financial damages, in addition to an injunction preventing Apple from using YouTube videos as a source for training artificial intelligence models in the future.
