Apple moves to dismiss DMCA suit by YouTube creators over AI training data

Apple filed a response in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, asking the judge to dismiss a class‑action lawsuit filed by three YouTube channels—h3h3Productions, MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics. The plaintiffs allege Apple scraped millions of publicly available videos from YouTube to train its artificial‑intelligence models, violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti‑circumvention provision (§ 1201(a)). Apple argues the videos were posted publicly without passwords or paywalls, that YouTube’s technical measures do not control access in the sense required by the DMCA, and that its own use is permitted under YouTube’s terms of service. The case highlights the legal uncertainty surrounding the use of publicly accessible online content for AI training and could influence how companies collect data for machine‑learning purposes.