David Millette, a YouTube content creator, has filed lawsuits against Nvidia and OpenAI in the Northern District of California. He claims both companies used his videos, along with millions of others, without permission to develop their artificial intelligence models. These lawsuits allege Nvidia and OpenAI engaged in unjust enrichment and unfair competition.
Allegations and Legal Claims
Millette accuses Nvidia of illegally scraping YouTube videos to enhance its Cosmos AI system. The suit states Nvidia used commercial servers to bypass YouTube’s detection mechanisms, leading to the download of approximately 80 years’ worth of video content per day. Millette is seeking class action status to represent similarly affected content creators.
Earlier this month, I reported that Nvidia’s Cosmos project was scraping data on YouTube and Netflix to train AI. According to documents and internal communications, Nvidia employees were directed to employ tools like yt-dlp, an open-source YouTube downloader, and virtual machines to bypass IP restrictions and download substantial amounts of video content.
Nvidia has defended its practices, asserting respect for content creators’ rights and compliance with legal standards. The company argues that learning from publicly accessible sources to create new, transformative works is within legal bounds.
Details of the Lawsuits
The lawsuit against Nvidia follows a similar one filed by Millette against OpenAI. Both suits focus on the large amounts of data needed for training large language models (LLMs) in generative AI. Millette describes the companies’ actions as “unfair, immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous, or injurious to consumers.”
Millette is seeking an injunction to stop the unauthorized use of his content, along with restitution and other damages. The complaint against OpenAI accuses the company of using automated tools to extract over one million hours of video content from YouTube.
Nvidia’s market performance has been exceptionally strong, with shares increasing by about 600% since early 2023, and a market capitalization surpassing $3 trillion. The growth is largely due to Nvidia’s critical role in the AI sector, especially in designing chips for AI applications.
Last Updated on November 7, 2024 3:15 pm CET
