Copyright lawsuits against AI companies are starting to pay off. Three YouTubers are filing class actions to make sure creators get their cut.

OpenAI‘s Sora was only available to the public for a few days when creators’ concerns began pouring in. Longtime tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee was among the most vocal. He posted a video showing how, when he asked Sora to generate a video of someone reviewing a smartphone, the results looked suspiciously like his own set–down to the plant on his desk.

“Are my videos in that source material?” Brownlee asked. “Is this exact plant part of the source material? Is it just a coincidence? I don’t know.”

His and other creators’ concerns boiled down to one question: Had OpenAI scraped their videos for its LLM training data, without their permission?

That question resulted in an infamous fail from OpenAI’s CTO, but never a concrete answer in court. Now, a year and a half later, Sora is dead–along with OpenAI’s billion-dollar Disney deal–but YouTubers are still fighting big tech companies for control of their videos.

To that end, h3h3 Productions parent company Ted Entertainment, golf creator Matt Fisher (aka MrShortGame Golf), and Golfholics have filed a flurry of class action lawsuits against companies including Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance, and Snap, all related to creators’ control of their content and its use for generative AI.

The group’s most recent two lawsuits, filed April 3 in California and Seattle courts, respectively, target Apple and Amazon, accusing them of using YouTubers’ videos to train their models.

“Rather than seek permission or pay a fair price for the audiovisual content hosted on YouTube, [the company] harvested content creators’ protected and copyrighted videos for commercial use and at scale without consent or compensation to the content creators,” the lawsuit against Apple claims.

It also accuses Apple of achieving “massive financial success” from adding AI features to devices. That supposed success “would not have been possible without the video content created by Plaintiffs and Class Members, which was intended for streaming on YouTube,” the suit claims.

The Amazon suit follows a similar path: It accuses the ecom giant of using creators’ videos to feed, train, deploy, and improve Nova Reel, its text-to-video generator. Like the Apple suit, this one cites DMCA, and says that by using creators’ videos, Amazon violated YouTube’s TOS.

It also alleges that their videos were scraped in way that purposefully bypassed YouTube’s protections against bulk downloading and extraction of videos. It suggests downloaders used things like bouncing/fake IP addresses, descrambling tools, and virtual servers to download mass amounts of data while remaining undetected.

What’s important to know about both these lawsuits is that plaintiffs aren’t saying Apple and Amazon did this scraping directly.

Instead, it’s accusing them of using a dataset called Panda-70M, which is a collection of 3.8 million YouTube videos, split into ~70 million clips, plus captions of all the video content. That dataset was put together by Snap, and released in 2024.

The same dataset is at the center of Ted Entertainment, Fisher, and Golfholics’ February lawsuit against Snap.

“[Snap]’s actions were 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,” that suit claims.

All of Ted Entertainment, Fisher, and Golfholics’ suits seek injunctions to protect their (and other creators’) videos from being used further, plus an undisclosed amount of financial recompense for damages.

So where does all this leave us?

Since ChatGPT’s public debut in 2022, there have been dozens of lawsuits filed with the express purpose of protecting artists and creators from having their work used by big tech. But those suits are only recently finding footholds–and having class actions specifically aimed at safeguarding creators, especially as YouTube continues pushing AI features on its platform, could help them have a voice as lawmakers begin to define regulations.