YouTuber Launches Class Action Lawsuit Against Nvidia for Scraping Videos
A YouTuber has filed a class action lawsuit against Nvidia after the technology company used his content to build an AI video model.
David Millette says that Nvidia has broken federal labor laws and enriched itself unjustly by scraping videos from YouTube without asking permission from the copyright holders.
Millette is not alleging copyright infringement against Nvidia, rather, he is accusing the company of unethical business practices. Nvidia, primarily known for making computer chips, denies this.
“We respect the rights of all content creators and are confident that we are working in full compliance with the letter and spirit of the law,” an Nvidia spokesperson tells 404 Media.
“Anyone is free to learn facts and ideas from publicly available sources. Creating new and transformative works is not only fair and just, but exactly what our legal system encourages.”
Millette brought his lawsuit against Nvidia after a 404 Media report earlier this month that detailed how Nvidia had been scraping videos from YouTube and Netflix to build a state-of-the-art foundation model, known internally as “Cosmos”, that could power different types of AI video generators.
Millette is seeking an injunction on the unauthorized use of his videos, restitution, and other damages. The amount he is claiming exceeds $5 million and there could be over 100 fellow YouTubers who could be part of the lawsuit.
“The unfair business practices described herein violate the UCL because they are unfair, immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, or injurious to consumers, and because Defendant used Plaintiff’s videos to train its Cosmos AI program for Defendant’s own commercial profit without the authorization of Plaintiff or the Class,” the complaint reads.
“Defendant unfairly profits from, and takes credit for, developing commercial products based on unattributed reproductions of those stolen videos and ideas.”
Millette has a similar class action lawsuit against OpenAI after the AI company allegedly transcribed millions of YouTube videos without the consent of creators or the video platform itself.
The complaint, filed on August 2 in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, accuses OpenAI of “covertly” transcribing videos to create training datasets for its LLM models including ChatGPT.
“By transcribing and using these videos in this way, Defendants profit from Plaintiff’s and class members’ data time and time again,” the complaint says.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
