Earlier this year, three YouTube channels sued Apple, alleging that the company violated the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by illegally accessing and removing millions of copyrighted YouTube videos to train its AI models.
In a class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in April, the owners of the YouTube channels h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics allege that Apple “deliberately circumvented” YouTube’s protections against video scraping and “benefited significantly from it.”
Apple’s actions were “not only illegal, but also constituted an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multi-billion dollar generative AI industry without any compensation,” the complaint claims.
h3h3Productions is a well-known YouTube channel created by Ethan Klein and Hila Klein, who later created the H3 podcast. Their channels have millions of followers, while MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics have hundreds of thousands of followers. The chains have filed equivalent lawsuits against Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance and Snap.
Apple responded to the lawsuit this week, according to a court document seen by Woozad. In short, Apple said that the plaintiffs made the videos publicly available on YouTube and that it was entitled to access the videos under the DMCA. Apple said YouTube’s terms of service also allow the company to access the videos.
“Plaintiffs claim that they posted audiovisual works on YouTube and that any member of the public can view them there,” Apple’s response reads. “No password. No payment. No lock. No key. Apparently, YouTube employs technological measures to prevent unauthorized downloads. But because YouTube provides public access to videos, the purported technological measures do not control access to the works, as required by Section 1201(a).”
Apple said the plaintiffs ultimately failed to state a claim and asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit as a result.
