YouTubers Sue Apple for Scraping Videos to Train AI

Apple is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit from several YouTube creators who allege the company illegally scraped millions of videos to train its artificial intelligence models. The plaintiffs claim that Apple bypassed technical protections to harvest copyrighted content without permission or compensation to fuel its machine learning systems.

The legal action was filed by three specific entities: Ted Entertainment LLC, which operates the h3h3Productions channel; Matt Fisher of MrShortGame Golf; and Golfaholics LLC. These creators represent a larger class of YouTubers whose work was allegedly used as training data.

The Panda-70M Dataset

Central to the lawsuit is a dataset known as Panda-70M. According to an academic paper published by Apple researchers, this dataset contains 70 million clips derived from millions of high-quality YouTube videos. The plaintiffs allege that Apple downloaded and processed this content for internal AI training purposes.

A Proof News investigation indicated that the dataset included content from major creators such as PewDiePie, Marques Brownlee, and MrBeast. The lawsuit specifies that Apple allegedly scraped content from 173,536 videos across 48,000 different channels.

Allegations of DMCA Violations

The complaint focuses on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), claiming that Apple deliberately circumvented YouTube’s controlled streaming architecture. This system is designed to prevent unauthorized downloads and automated scraping of content.

Rather than seek permission or pay a fair price for the audiovisual content hosted on YouTube, [Apple] harvested content creators’ protected and copyrighted videos for commercial use and at scale without consent or compensation to the content creators

Lawsuit filed by YouTube creators

The plaintiffs argue that Apple’s financial success with its AI features was made possible by using video content that was intended solely for streaming on the YouTube platform. They characterize the practice as an attack on the creator community to fuel the generative AI industry.

Legal Demands and Potential Damages

The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court, seeks several forms of relief and compensation:

• Statutory damages under the DMCA, which can range from $750 to $30,000 per work.
• Injunctive relief to force Apple to stop using the scraped content.
• Restitution and the payment of legal fees.
• Formal recognition of the affected group of YouTube creators.

Broader Industry Context

This litigation is part of a wider trend of creators targeting AI companies for unauthorized data harvesting. The same three YouTube channels—h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfaholics—have filed similar lawsuits against other major tech firms, including:

• Meta
• Nvidia
• Snap
• ByteDance (the owner of TikTok)

Apple is currently managing multiple legal challenges regarding its AI implementation. While this lawsuit focuses on the illegal acquisition of training data, the company is also facing litigation from iPhone 16 customers who claim Apple failed to deliver the AI features advertised for the device.