YouTubers team up to sue Apple over claims of 'unconscionable attack' on creators' rights
Apple has been sued in a potentially landmark case by three prominent YouTubers, as they claim the tech giant launched an 'unconscionable attack' on the rights of creators by mass downloading videos with the intention to train its own AI.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence has left a lot of legal gray areas when it comes to copyright, as not only do creators have to face the threat that their own content will be reproduced using generative tools, but that what they produced was used to train the model in the first place.
Most major AI models are trained on millions, if not billions, of different data sets with things like films, books, and music seemingly playing a key role despite the questionable legality.
One area that you might not have considered to also be at risk, however, is YouTube, as what better resource for training than the tens of billions of videos freely available on the site featuring perfect examples of faces and voices to mould AI towards.
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While the vast majority of YouTube channels might not have the legal strength of Hollywood studios or leading record labels, their content is still protected by copyright laws and a new lawsuit claims that Apple has breached these 'unconscionably'.
As reported by Dexerto, three YouTubers have launched a legal challenge against the tech giant, with Ethan Klein's h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfaholics emerging as the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit, filed in California's federal courts last Friday (April 3), alleges that Apple violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by "unlawfully circumventing technological protection measures to access and scrape millions of copyrighted videos from the online video viewing platform, YouTube, in order to feed, train, improve, and commercialize [Apple's] large-scale generative text-to-video artificial intelligence ("AI") model."
While certain third-party tools exist that allow people to download individual videos – and paying for YouTube Premium lets you view content offline within the app – the lawsuit claims that Apple deliberately broke the platform's rules to scrape content en masse, referencing a peer-reviewed research paper published by Apple that outlines the process.
Apple "deployed tools designed to evade and circumvent YouTube's [technological protection measures] by deploying automated systems that replicated and manipulated authorized request flows while evading enforcement mechanisms, thereby gaining access to the underlying works in a form not available to the public and outside the conditions authorized by the copyright owner."
In addition, the plaintiffs argue that Apple's "actions were not only unlawful, but 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."
While the lawsuit was brought forward by the aforementioned three channels, it is a class action suit that would provide countless creators affected by the alleged video scraping measures with financial compensation for the claimed copyright breach.
Anyone in the United States "who are creators and/or rights-holders of YouTube-hosted videos that Apple access at the file level by scraping, downloading, or otherwise extracting underlying video files from YouTube through circumvention of YouTube's TPMs" would be eligible for this compensation, although it's unclear right now what this figure would amount to.