A collection of YouTube channels are suing Apple under the provisions of the DMCA, with the company accused of scraping videos from YouTube and using them to train internal AI models.

In a lawsuit filed on April 3 at the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, a trio of YouTube entities are suing Apple over allegations of copyright infringement. Apple is accused of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), all to collect footage to train its AI models.

The class-action lawsuit is headed up by Ted Entertainment, owners of the h3h3Productions channels and podcast. Two golf channels accompany Ted Entertainment, with MrShortGameGolf and Golfholics also involved in the legal action.

The filing, spotted by MacRumors, insists that Apple used tools to evade YouTube's protection measures, downloading the videos. This apparently involved using computers with rotating IP addresses to scrape the data.

This data was then used to create an archive that was used to train "Apple AI Video." As proof of this, the suit refers to an academic paper from Apple's researchers disclosing it had trained using Panda-70M.

Panda-70M is described as a dataset made entirely of YouTube videos. All acquired via scraping YouTube for content. Ted Entertainment's content is in a total of 438 videos, with MrShortGameGolf's content in 8 videos, and Golfholics in 62 videos.

An "attack" on content creators

Ted Entertainment also has the highest subscriber count of the three at 2.6 million subscribers across all channels. MrShortGameGolf has over 500,000 subscribers, while Golfholics has over 130,000.

While this could've been a normal copyright infringement case, the filing says it concerns itself with Apple's "deliberate circumvention" of YouTube's security measures. This is something the general public does not have access to, and therefore abides by YouTube's mechanisms for typical use.

The act is declared as "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 suit is being framed as a class-action lawsuit, on behalf of YouTube creators whose works were scraped and ingested for training without permission.

The plaintiffs seek class-action certification, a declaration that Apple willfully circumvented copy protection systems, the maximum statutory damages, injunctive relief, attorneys fees, and costs. They also want an injunction preventing Apple from continuing the infringement, as well as a further award of pre-judgment and post-judgment interest, and any other relief the court grants.

A continuing AI dogfight

Apple is not the only target of Ted Entertainment when it comes to AI. It has previously gone after other major companies, including Bytedance, Meta, and Nvidia, with similar accusations of video scraping.

While Apple stands accused of avoiding copy protection measures, it is one of the more seemingly ethical AI companies out there. Back in 2023, it was doing its best to train its models ethically, such as by trying to license the works of Conde Nast, as well as attempts to make deals with IAC and NBC News.

However, Apple has still been dragged into data collection lawsuits. In March 2026, it was roped into a lawsuit with Chicken Soup for the Soul LLC alongside other tech giants, due to the alleged use of a dataset known as "The Pile."

"The Pile" was a shadow library of many pirated copyrighted works, allegedly used by many models over the years.