Apple has asked a U.S. court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by three YouTube channels that accuse the company of using copyrighted videos to train its AI models without permission.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this year by the owners of h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics. They claim Apple accessed and scraped millions of YouTube videos while bypassing YouTube’s protections against unauthorized downloading.
According to the complaint, Apple used creator content to support its AI work without paying the people who made those videos. The channels also filed similar lawsuits against Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance, and Snap.
Apple has now responded in court and denied that the lawsuit states a valid claim under the DMCA. The company argued that the plaintiffs uploaded their videos to YouTube, where any member of the public could view them without a password, payment, or restricted access.
Apple also said YouTube’s technical measures did not control access to the videos in the way required under the DMCA, because the videos were already publicly available on the platform. Based on that argument, Apple said the plaintiffs failed to show that the company unlawfully bypassed protected access controls.
The court will now decide whether the case can move forward or whether Apple’s request for dismissal should end the lawsuit at this early stage.
