The AI initiatives of Apple are now facing a familiar obstacle as content creators are pushing back. The situation has escalated to the courtroom.
A lawsuit has been filed against Apple by three different YouTube channels. They have alleged that the company secretly collected their videos and used them to train its AI models.
The suit has been filed by popular channels which include h3h3Productions and also golf channels named Golfholics and MrShortGame.
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Their claim is that their videos were used by Apple without obtaining any kind of permission, credit or payment.
The lawsuit states that the company circumvented YouTube’s protections and directly downloaded and utilised the videos.
It has been argued by the creators that it is a clear violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The act prohibits bypassing systems designed to protect copyrighted material.
It is alleged by the creators that Apple has made hefty profits by using their videos without consent to build its AI system.
Apple did not give anything back to the creators they used to videos of.
The lawsuit revolves around a dataset named Panda-70M. This data set was referenced by Apple researchers in a paper published in 2025 on video-generation AI.
The dataset Panda-70M is a comprehensive index of YouTube clips, which are then organised by URLs, identifiers and timestamps.
In order to utilise these clips an individual would need to access and extract them from YouTube.
The complainants argued that accessing these clips means circumventing around YouTube’s safeguards.
They claimed that their videos appear hundreds of times in the dataset.
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