Three YouTube content creators , namely the company behind H3H3 Productions, a golf broadcaster, and a golf channel, have filed a class action lawsuit in Seattle, alleging that Amazon circumvented technical protections YouTube's by using virtual machine infrastructure and IP rotation to rip their videos (without consent) and train Nova Reel .
The lawsuit invokes provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and is the latest in a series of similar cases that the same group has filed against Nvidia, Meta, ByteDance, Snap, OpenAI and Apple.
Ted Entertainment Inc., the company behind H3H3 Productions and H3 Podcast Highlights, filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington along with Matt Fisher, who runs the MrShortGame Golf channel, and Golfholics Inc.The three plaintiffs collectively have more than 2.6 million YouTube subscribers, nearly four billion combined views and more than 5,800 original videos.
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The lawsuit names Amazon as the defendant and specifically targets Nova Reel as the product that was made in part with their content.
The lawsuit is based on Section 1201 of the DMCA, the provision that prohibits circumvention of technological protection measuresput in place by copyright owners to limit access to their works. The plaintiffs argue that YouTube's systems for protecting video files constitute such technological protection measures and that Amazon intentionally and on a large scale circumvented them to extract training data.
If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, the act of downloading videos from YouTube for AI training purposes will constitute a violation of the DMCA regardless of whether the content is publicly accessible (because circumventing the technical mechanisms that enforce the terms of service crosses the legal line).
The complaint focuses on what the plaintiffs describe as the permanent nature of the harm: “Once the AI ingests content, that content is stored in its neural network and cannot be deleted or recalled.” The plaintiffs are seeking both damages and injunctive relief, the latter of which could potentially force Amazon to stop distributing a model that was partially trained on their content (or retrain it without the disputed material).
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How did Amazon collect data from YouTube channels?
The complaint focuses on two academic datasets: HD-VILA-100M, produced by Microsoft Research Asia in 2021, and HD-VG-130M, produced by researchers at Peking University and Microsoft. Both were published for academic purposes and consist of URL identifiers that point to YouTube videos rather than the video files themselves. This distinction is legally important: to use either dataset to train AI models, a company must download the actual video files from YouTube, and the plaintiffs allege that Amazon did just that.
According to the complaint, Amazon didn't just download the videos. It developed automated programs combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to avoid detection and blocking systems YouTube's The combination of these technical measures is characterized in the complaint as a deliberate circumvention of the technological protections that YouTube maintains over its video library.
Nova Reel
Nova Reel is Amazon's text-to-video generative AI model, released in December 2024 and available through Amazon Bedrock. The model takes text messages and images as inputs and creates short videos, with a watermarking feature that Amazon positions as a measure of content authenticity. It joins the broader Nova family of models, which Amazon is expanding to text, image, and video formats as competition in enterprise AI accelerates.
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Similar lawsuits
The three plaintiffs brought this lawsuit because of their prior litigation experience. In December 2025, Ted Entertainment, Fisher, and Golfholics filed a class action lawsuit against Nvidia , alleging that it had used the same HD-VILA-100M and HD-VG-130M datasets and the same IP-rotation and virtual machine infrastructure to train the Cosmos video model . In January 2026, the group expanded the strategy, filing lawsuits against Meta, ByteDance, and Snap . In the first week of April, parallel lawsuits against OpenAI and Apple were filed in the Northern District of California. The lawsuit against Amazon, filed in Seattle, is the most recent.
