Creators sue Amazon, alleging YouTube videos were scraped to train Nova Reel

What happened

Content creators sued Amazon on 3 April 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging the company scraped their YouTube videos to train Nova Reel, its text-to-video generative AI model.

The plaintiffs are Ted Entertainment, Inc. (which operates the h3h3 Productions and H3 Podcast YouTube channels), Matt Fisher (the MrShortGame Golf channel), and Golfholics, Inc. They allege Amazon used automated video-downloading programs combined with virtual machines rotating IP addresses to circumvent YouTube's technological protections and harvest videos at scale without consent or compensation.

The claim

The single claim is under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provision (17 U.S.C. § 1201). The complaint alleges Amazon bypassed YouTube's technical measures to obtain videos and feed them into its AI training pipeline. Amazon says it trains Nova Reel on "curated data from a variety of sources, including licensed and proprietary data, open source datasets, and publicly available data where appropriate." The plaintiffs argue that a video being publicly viewable does not authorize downloading it and feeding it into a commercial AI training pipeline. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment beyond saying the company does not discuss matters in active litigation.

Context

This is one of seven near-identical DMCA suits the same plaintiffs filed against different companies over YouTube scraping for video AI models. In the ByteDance suit, a judge denied the motion to dismiss on 2 October 2026 (already on this site). In the Nvidia suit, Ted Entertainment withdrew its own claims on 27 October 2026 while Fisher remained a plaintiff; no dismissal has been reported for the Amazon suit.