Apple sued for allegedly scraping 70 million YouTube movies

Apple’s AI plans are going through a well-recognized problem as creators push again, and now they’re taking the difficulty to courtroom.

Three YouTube channels have sued Apple, claiming the corporate secretly collected movies from the platform to coach its AI fashions (by way of MacRumors). The case includes well-known channels like h3h3Productions and golf creators similar to MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics. They are saying Apple used their movies with out permission, fee, and even fundamental credit score.

The lawsuit says Apple did extra than simply hyperlink to content material. It claims Apple bought round YouTube’s protections to obtain and use movies immediately. The creators argue this breaks the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans getting previous techniques meant to guard copyrighted materials.

The lawsuit additionally says Apple made important income through the use of creators’ content material to construct its AI system, with out giving something again to the individuals who made the movies.

The lawsuit highlights a dataset known as Panda-70M, which Apple researchers talked about in a 2025 paper on video-generation AI. Panda-70M is a big index of YouTube clips, segmented and arranged by URLs, timestamps, and identifiers. To make use of these clips, somebody must entry and extract every one from YouTube.

The plaintiffs say that accessing these clips means getting round YouTube’s safeguards, making every clip a separate act of scraping. Additionally they declare their very own movies seem a whole bunch of instances within the dataset.

Apple has not defined intimately the way it dealt with the information, however its analysis papers verify that YouTube movies have been utilized in its AI coaching course of. At this level, the lawsuit is asking for damages and probably an injunction.