Three established YouTube channels sued Apple in California federal court last week, accusing the company of scraping millions of copyrighted videos from YouTube to train its AI models without permission. The class action says Apple violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and deliberately got around YouTube’s anti-scraping protections.
The plaintiffs include the owners of h3h3Productions, H3 Podcast, H3 Podcast Highlights, MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics, channels with millions of followers in the first three cases and hundreds of thousands in the golf channels. They are seeking an injunction and damages for themselves and for others similarly situated in the United States, making this more than a dispute over a few clips and turning it into a challenge to how AI companies gather training data.
The complaint says Apple’s own research papers show that some of the plaintiffs’ YouTube videos were used to train its AI models. It also says Apple “deliberately circumvented” YouTube’s protections and “profited substantially” from the alleged scraping. The lawsuit calls that conduct “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.”
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The case lands in a wave of similar fights. In recent months, the same three YouTube channels have filed lawsuits against Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance and Snap, all tied to allegations that videos were scraped without authorization for AI model training. For Apple, the filing raises the same question now shadowing much of the generative AI industry: whether companies can build products on creators’ work without paying for it, and whether the courts will treat that as innovation or infringement.
h3h3Productions was created by Ethan Klein and Hila Klein, and its presence in the case underscores how widely followed the plaintiffs are. The answer to the headline question is already in the filing: the creators say Apple crossed the line, and they are asking a federal court to stop it and make it pay.
