Apple is being sued by multiple YouTube channels for allegedly scraping millions of YouTube videos for AI training.
Apple has been sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for allegedly illegally scraping millions of videos from YouTube to train its AI models. The lawsuit is a class-action suit filed by Ted Entertainment, Matt Fisher, and Golfholics on behalf of content creators across the United States. The plaintiffs allege that Apple intentionally circumvented YouTube's technical protection measures (TPM) to infringe on copyrights and are seeking damages and an injunction.
Ted Entertainment v. Apple | PDF
Apple Sued by Three YouTube Channels - MacRumors
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/06/apple-sued-by-three-youtube-channels/
Apple accused of scraping millions of YouTube videos for AI training - 9to5Mac
https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/06/proposed-class-action-accuses-apple-of-scraping-millions-of-youtube-videos-for-ai-training/
In their complaint, the plaintiffs pointed out that Apple's research team publicly stated in their paper ' STIV: Scalable Text and Image Conditioned Video Generation ,' published in late 2024, that they used a dataset called 'Panda-70M' to train their video generation model.
The Panda-70M dataset contains approximately 70.8 million video clips, but in reality, it's merely an index pointing to videos on YouTube. For Apple to use this to train its AI, it needed to download video files directly from YouTube's servers, and it has been suggested that this process bypassed multiple access controls implemented by YouTube.
The technical protection measures (TPMs) that were specifically circumvented include five main mechanisms.
One such measure is an encryption technique called 'rolling cipher' that conceals the true URL of the video file. The plaintiffs then argued that Apple circumvented this by using a virtual machine to continuously switch IP addresses within an IP-based monitoring system that blocks a large volume of automated access.
It has also been pointed out that the program continuously updated the restrictions on session-limited URLs that expired in a short time, circumvented CAPTCHA authentication used for bot detection, and forged the token system that proves requests come from authorized players.
The plaintiffs argue that Apple's actions clearly violate YouTube's terms of service, criticizing it for 'unfairly exploiting creators' intellectual property as 'fuel' to build a multi-trillion dollar (hundreds of trillions of yen) generative AI industry, refusing to obtain permission from creators or pay them fair compensation for its own profits.'
In this lawsuit, the plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages up to the legal limit, an injunction ordering Apple to cease the use of the infringing content, and payment of attorney's fees from Apple.
In addition to Apple, the plaintiffs have also filed similar class-action lawsuits against Amazon and OpenAI, alleging their use of the Panda-70M.
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in AI, Posted by log1i_yk