Amazon sued by YouTubers for allegedly scraping their content to train AI video tool

A trio of YouTube producers filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon alleging the tech giant illegally used content from the video platform to train and improve its Nova Reel generative AI model.

The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, describes how Amazon allegedly used datasets earmarked only for academic use, circumvented YouTube’s copyright protection measures, and scraped video content. KING5 first reported on the suit.

“In a world where Defendant and others can circumvent technological protections to exploit copyrighted works without authorization with impunity, creators will be less likely to make their creations available on YouTube and other similar platforms, for fear of losing all control of them,” the plaintiffs state in their suit. “The world will be poorer for it.”

Plaintiffs are seeking damages, restitution and injunctive relief, claiming Amazon violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

GeekWire contacted Amazon for comment.

Amazon released its Nova foundation models in 2024 via AWS Bedrock. The Nova Reel model can take text prompts and images and turn them into short videos, with features including watermarking.

According to the suit, Amazon deployed automated download tools paired with virtual machines that cycled through IP addresses to avoid being blocked, enabling the unauthorized extraction of data from millions of videos.

The named plaintiffs include:

• Ted Entertainment, Inc. (TEI), a California-based media company owned by Ethan and Hila Klein with more than 5,800 videos on YouTube with a combined total of more than 4 billion views. TEI channels include h3h3 Productions and H3 Podcast Highlights.
• Matt Fisher, a California-based YouTuber who runs the MrShortGame Golf channel that provides instructional videos and has more than 500,000 subscribers.
• Golfholics, a golf-focused YouTube channel with more than 130,000 subscribers and millions of views.

The suit argues the plaintiffs have no way to recover intellectual property already used to train Amazon’s models. “Once AI ingests content, that content is stored in its neural network and not capable of deletion or retraction,” it states.

Dozens of similar cases are working their way through courts nationwide. Among them: the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, a class action by authors against Microsoft, and a suit from musicians with YouTube content against Google.

Separate lawsuits against Anthropic and music-generation startup Suno over the alleged unauthorized use of books and music in AI training have since settled. A case brought by authors against Meta was dismissed.