YouTubers Sue Amazon for Allegedly Scraping Their Videos to Train Nova Reel
April 9, 2026 – 10:03 am
In short:
Three YouTube content creators—the company behind H3H3 Productions, a solo golf presenter, and a golf channel—have filed a proposed class action lawsuit in Seattle. They accuse Amazon of bypassing YouTube’s technical protections using virtual machines and rotating IP addresses to scrape their videos without consent for training datasets for Nova Reel, its generative video AI model accessible through Amazon Bedrock. The suit relies on the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and is part of a growing series of similar cases against tech giants like Nvidia, Meta, ByteDance, Snap, OpenAI, and Apple.
Ted Entertainment Inc., owner of H3H3 Productions and H3 Podcast Highlights (Ethan and Hila Klein’s YouTube channels), joined forces with Matt Fisher (MrShortGame Golf channel) and Golfholics Inc. The collective has over 2.6 million YouTube subscribers, totaling around four billion views and more than 5,800 original videos. The lawsuit specifically targets Amazon and Nova Reel as the products built partially on their content.
The Complaint and Legal Theory
The lawsuit hinges on Section 1201 of the DMCA, which prohibits bypassing technological protection measures (TPMs) set by copyright holders to control access to their works. Plaintiffs argue that YouTube’s systems for protecting its video files qualify as TPMs, and Amazon deliberately circumvented them at scale to gather training data. If successful in court, this could establish that downloading YouTube videos for AI training purposes is a DMCA violation, regardless of public accessibility, as bypassing technical mechanisms that enforce terms of service crosses the legal line.
The complaint emphasizes the permanent nature of the harm: "Once AI ingests content, that content is stored in its neural network and not capable of deletion or retraction." Plaintiffs seek both damages and injunctive relief to stop Amazon from distributing a model trained on their content or to force them to retrain it without the disputed material.
How Scraping Allegedly Occurred
The complaint focuses on two academic datasets: HD-VILA-100M (Microsoft Research Asia, 2021) and HD-VG-130M (a collaboration between Peking University and Microsoft). These datasets contain URL identifiers pointing to YouTube videos rather than the videos themselves. Plaintiffs claim Amazon downloaded the actual video files from YouTube using these datasets for AI model training.