Amazon is among the companies accused of circumventing YouTube's technological protection measures, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to scrape copyrighted videos to train its AI video generator. OpenAI and Apple face similar accusations. (NurPhoto via AP/Artur Widak)
The products targeted in the litigation are Amazon's Nova Reel, OpenAI's Sora and Apple's AI video models.
The trio each deploys "scraping tools that are designed to evade and circumvent YouTube's access restrictions," systematically circumventing the platform's technological protection measures, the suits say. Using automated video-downloading programs with machines to rotate IP addresses to avoid detection, Amazon, OpenAI and Apple are able to access and extract large amounts of videos at once, the complaints say.
The defendants "then used plaintiffs' and class members' intellectual property for their own commercial gain in developing and commercializing" their AI system, the creators allege, adding that YouTube's anti-circumvention software and protective measures "are a driving factor behind many content creators' decision to upload their video content" to the platform.
"Rather than seek permission or pay a fair price for the audiovisual content hosted on YouTube, defendant harvested content creators' protected and copyrighted videos for commercial use and at scale without consent or compensation to the content creators," the plaintiffs allege in the Amazon suit.
"Content creators such as plaintiffs and the class members will never be able to claw back the intellectual property unlawfully copied and used by defendant to train its generative AI models," the creators say. "Once AI ingests content, that content is stored in its neural network and not capable of deletion or retraction."
The creators specifically allege that the defendants' circumvention of YouTube's technological protection measures, or TPM, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
They also note that YouTube's terms of service explicitly prohibit "scraping, unauthorized downloading, bulk extraction, or other forms of data mining of audiovisual content."
According to the Amazon complaint, the full extent of the company's alleged unauthorized access and extraction is not yet known, and that Amazon has "compounded this uncertainty by deliberately concealing the origins of Nova Reel's training data behind the vague label of 'publicly available' data."
"The label 'publicly available' does not mean lawfully obtained," the creators say.
They seek to represent a nationwide class of potentially thousands of people whose videos were posted on YouTube and were accessed by Amazon.
The suits seek declarations that Amazon, OpenAI and Apple "willfully circumvented the copyright protection systems of YouTube intended to protect" the creators' audiovisual content, as well as statutory damages, injunctive relief, litigation costs and attorney fees.
"The promise that AI makes to all of us is that our lives will be improved if we embrace it. Whether that is true remains to be seen," the plaintiffs' attorney Josh Sanford of Ellzey Kherkher Sanford & Montgomery LLP told Law360 on Monday.
"But on the way to whatever future AI is trying to create for us, we think it's important to protect the traditional values of intellectual property, and to prevent large-scale raiding and theft of the rights of individuals and small businesses," he said.
Representatives for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
These are far from the first AI developers to face litigation over their data-collection practices.
Music publisher BMG Rights Management last month accused Anthropic PBC of making unauthorized use of recordings to train its Claude models, adding to a heap of legacy media companies accusing AI companies of infringement.
Anthropic has also been accused of copyright infringement by other music publishers including Universal Music Publishing Group, as well as a group of authors who alleged their works were used to train Claude. The authors later reached a "historic" $1.5 billion settlement with the company.
The publishers of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post are pursuing claims that Perplexity AI used their copyrighted content to train its AI-powered search engine and that the engine will spit out verbatim portions of articles or give similar summaries of them.
The YouTube creators are represented by Janelle Bailey of Washington Injury Law and Josh Sanford, Jarrett Lee Ellzey, Tom Kherkher, Leigh S. Montgomery and Tyler Yagman of Ellzey Kherkher Sanford Montgomery LLP.
Counsel information for Amazon, Open AI and Apple was not immediately available.
The cases are Ted Entertainment Inc. et al. v. Amazon.com Inc., case number 2:26-cv-01134, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, Ted Entertainment Inc. et al. v. OpenAI Inc. et al., case number 3:26-cv-02935, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and Ted Entertainment Inc. et al. v. Apple Inc., case number 3:26-cv-02936, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
--Additional reporting by Elliot Weld, Hailey Konnath, Bonnie Eslinger and Adam Lidgett. Editing by Michael Watanabe.
Update: This article has been updated with details about the plaintiffs' similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Apple, as well as a comment from the plaintiffs' counsel.
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