A trio of new Complaints were filed by Ted Entertainment and Golfholics in US District Courts during the first week of April, accusing OpenAI, Apple and Amazon of scraping their copyrighted videos from YouTube and using them to train their artificial intelligence models.
The same Plaintiffs had filed a similar Complaint against nVidia in December 2025, and had also previously sued Meta and Bytedance.
Ted Entertainment, Inc. is an independent California based media company and content creator with over 5,800 original videos on YouTube. As of the date of the lawsuit, their properties had a combined total of over 4 billion views. Ted Entertainment has more than 2.6 million followers on YouTube. It also owns the channels “h3h3 Productions” and “H3 Podcast Highlights.”
Third-party datasets
There is an interesting wrinkle: all of these lawsuits identify the Defendants’ use of datasets that were amassed independently of those companies, and intended for use in academic research. HD-VILA-100M was compiled and released by Microsoft Research Asia in 2021. HD-VG-130M was compiled by researchers affiliated with Peking University, Microsoft and others. Panda-70m was developed by Snap Inc. and the University of California. HowTo100M was created by the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology and other collaborators.
Together, these datasets are associated with over 100 million video clips.
The individual Golfholics (et al) videos are identified in the Complaint. 146 videos by H3H3 Productions appear in HD-VILA-100M, 83 videos in HD-VG-130M, 155 videos in Panda-70M, and 24 videos in HowTo100M. H3 Podcast Highlights appears with 285 videos in HD-VILA-100M, 209 videos in HD-VG-130M, 283 videos in Panda-70M, and 1 video in HowTo100M.
Amazon was accused of:
“…unlawfully circumventing technological protection measures to access and scrape millions of copyrighted videos from the online video viewing platform, YouTube, in order to feed, train, improve, and commercialize Defendant’s large-scale generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) model named “Nova Reel.”
“Nova Reel is a text-to-video AI model conceived and marketed as Amazon’s dedicated video generation platform. Amazon Nova Reel is commercially available through Amazon Bedrock, Amazon’s managed AI services platform, where Amazon charges enterprise customers per second of video generated. Amazon Nova Reel was developed by Amazon AGI, the artificial general intelligence division of Amazon.com, Inc., and was publicly launched in December 15, 2024, as part of the Amazon Nova family of commercial foundation models.”
“…On information and belief, Defendant used automated video-downloading programs combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to avoid detection and blocking…
“To retrieve audiovisual files at scale, Defendant was required to defeat TPM (1), the rolling cipher that protects the true media file URL. On information and belief, Defendant used one or more descrambling tools designed to defeat YouTube’s proprietary signature-transformation logic, allowing automated systems to generate valid file requests outside the authorized player environment and thereby obtain the underlying media files directly. Such tools (are readily available).”
The Plaintiffs noted that while most YouTube videos are not registered with the US Copyright Office, they still are protected under Copyright law.
Apple & OpenAI similar to the Amazon complaint
In the lawsuit against Apple, Golfholics and Ted Entertainment, the charges and the proposed remedies were the same those named in the Complaint against Amazon. This Complaint targets a platform it calls “Apple AI Video,” Apple does not yet offer a generative AI platform commercially, but the Complaint contends that “Apple AI Video models are a core feature of Defendant’s future plans.” Apple was accused of using the Panda-70 dataset, which contains videos by “h3h3 Productions” and “H3 Podcast Highlights.”
The Complaint against OpenAI was also similar: “…to access and scrape millions of copyrighted videos from the online video viewing platform, YouTube, in order to feed, train, improve, and commercialize Defendant’s large-scale generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) model named “Sora.” It’s interesting that Sora was targeted, as OpenAI has announced that Sora is to be discontinued. But as of the date of the Complaint, and of this writing a few days later, Sora continued to be available.
Relief sought by Ted Entertainment
In addition to a jury trial, declaration that the Defendants wilfully circumvented copyright protection, Ted Entertainment (et al) want up to the maximum in statutory damages (up to $150,000 per violation), payment of filing and legal fees, and permanent injunctions against further infringement.
Earlier lawsuits
This isn’t the first volley of lawsuits by Ted Entertainment, Matt Fisher and Golfaholics. In 2025, they were Plaintiffs in a similar complaint against nVidia; saying the company had intentionally bypassed restrictions to access source video files using a similar rotating IP address technique.
In addition to the Complaints referenced above, the Plaintiffs had also previously sued Meta and Bytedance.
Why it matters
One might, at first, wonder why the Plaintiffs would not be going after the developers of the infringing datasets themselves. The HDVILA-100M, HD-VG-130M, Panda 70M, and HowTo100M datasets consist of location identifiers that point to millions of YouTube videos or clips. But none of them contains the underlying audiovisual files themselves, and all of them are published with the disclaimer that they are for academic use only.
To use them in training, a company must access, retrieve and download every referenced video directly from YouTube. Also, regardless of where the datasets came from, the platform companies are downloading and using them for commercial purposes.
As they did with its previous lawsuits, Ted Entertainment (et al) seek to establish class-action status that anyone whose copyrighted content becomes scraped by the Defendants could join, as well as confirmation that the Defendants intentionally circumvented YouTube’s copy-protection regimen and sought to hide their infringing behavior by using a scheme of rotating IP addresses.
If the Plaintiffs succeed in convincing the Courts to establish class-action status, they could conceivably enable anyone posting a video to YouTube to sue these Defendants.
Further reading
Complaint. Ted Entertainment Inc, Matt Fisher and Golfholics Inc, Plaintiffs, v. Amazon.com, Inc. Case 2:26-cv-01134. Document 1. Filed April 3, 2026. US District Court for the Western District of Washington, Seattle Division.
Complaint. Ted Entertainment et al, Plaintiffs, v. Apple Inc. Case 3:26-cv-02936. Document 1. Filed April 3, 2026. US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Complaint. Ted Entertainment et al, Plaintiffs, v. OpenAI Inc (et al)., Defendants. Case 3:26-cv-02935. Filed April 3, 2026. US District Court for the Northern District of California.
nVidia sued for allegedly scraping copyright-protected video from YouTube, in potential class action. Article. December 1, 2025. by Steven Hawley. Piracy Monitor
