Nvidia and OpenAI face lawsuits from YouTube creators over use of online videos

Diving certificate:

• A federal lawsuit alleges that Nvidia, which focuses on developing chips for AI, used videos from YouTube creator David Millette for its AI training work. The lawsuit accuses Nvidia of “unjust enrichment and unfair competition” and seeks a class action lawsuit to include other YouTube content creators with similar claims..
• According to the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California, Nvidia unlawfully “scraped” YouTube videos to train its Cosmos AI software. Nvidia used software on commercial servers to evade detection by YouTube and download “approximately 80 years of video content per day,” the lawsuit says, citing an Aug. 5 case. 404 Media report.
• “We We respect the rights of all content creators and are confident that we operate in full compliance with the letter and spirit of the law,” Nvidia said in a statement to Legal Dive on Friday.

Diving insight:

The Nvidia lawsuit was filed less than two weeks after Millette's similar lawsuit against OpenAI. The lawsuits illustrate how the large language models (LLMs) underlying GenAI require massive amounts of data, typically sourced from the internet.

In none of Millette's lawsuits over the use of his YouTube videos did he accuse the defendants of copyright infringement. Instead, he accused the technology companies of unjust enrichment and business practices. In Nvidia's case, the lawsuit says, these practices were “unfair, immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, or harmful to consumers.”

Millette is seeking an injunction against the unauthorized use of his videos as well as compensatory and other damages.

Millette's lawsuit against OpenAI accuses the company of stealing more than a million hours of video from YouTube using “automated means” such as robots or programmed video scrapers.

According to the report by 404 Media, which cites a former Nvidia employee who requested anonymity, Nvidia also seized videos from Netflix and other online sources.

“A“Everyone is free to acquire facts and ideas from publicly available sources,” Nvidia said in its response to the lawsuit. “Creating new and groundbreaking works is not only fair and just, but exactly what our legal system encourages.”

In April, the New York Times reported that Open AI was a Speech recognition tool called Whisper to transcribe audio from YouTube videos after the supply of online text was exhausted. These videos represent “one of the largest corpora of natural language data available for training and fine-tuning OpenAI's language models,” Open AI's complaint states.

Nvidia shares have risen about 600% since the start of 2023 – its market cap is over $3 trillion – as the chipmaker has become the Silicon Valley technology company most closely associated with the AI ​​boom.

Millette is represented by Bursor & Fisher.