Ted Entertainment Inc., a company held by h3h3 creators Ethan and Hila Klein, sued Nvidia in California federal court on Nov. 26, along with fellow YouTuber Matt Fisher, who runs the channel Mr.ShortGame Golf, and Golfholics Inc. They alleged violations of the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The YouTubers said Nvidia bypassed YouTube's internal measures meant to protect its video files to scrape videos from the platform. The website's terms of service expressly prohibit scraping or unauthorized mass downloading of video content, according to the suit.
The website's terms say video creators give YouTube license for certain uses, but the license says it "does not grant any rights or permissions for a user to make use" of the video content independent of YouTube, the suit said.
"Defendant used a video-downloading program combined with virtual machines that rotated IP addresses to avoid detection and blocking — enabling the mass extraction of, at times, eighty years of video content per day," the suit said.
The suit said most YouTube videos do not have registered copyrights, but that does not render them totally unprotected as intellectual property since their creators "invest time, skill and resources into producing their works."
YouTube does offer downloading options to its premium users, but that only allows for offline viewing of videos, not access to the video files themselves, according to the suit.
Cosmos is an AI model at the center of several other services offered by Nvidia, according to the suit, and the company therefore needed "significant amounts of data" to improve and commercialize it. Nvidia is trying to give Cosmos the ability to turn language prompts into audiovisual content and directed employees to find datasets to enter into Cosmos, the suit reads.
According to the YouTubers, Nvidia's employees have a Slack channel called #cosmos-dataset-creation. A screenshot of the Slack channel included in the suit shows an Nvidia researcher saying there's an "initiative to aggregate a huge curated video dataset for the purposes of generative modeling."
The company obtained data from academic, research and other video collections created by universities, companies and independent researchers to meet its goals, the YouTubers said.
According to the suit, Nvidia said in May 2024 that it had downloaded 38.5 million video URLs.
The suit adds to a stack of cases filed in federal courts alleging widespread copyright infringement by companies seeking to train artificial intelligence. Nvidia was sued by YouTuber David Millette in August 2024 over allegations that his videos were scraped to train Cosmos. Millette voluntarily dismissed the case in March.
A representative for Nvidia declined to comment.
"This lawsuit is a critical step in protecting the rights and livelihoods of content creators," said Tom Kherkher, who is representing the YouTubers, in a statement. "Nvidia is one of the world's most valuable companies, yet it allegedly built its foundational AI model on the back of YouTube content it scraped without permission from the underlying creators and violation of YouTube's Terms of Service."
The YouTubers are represented by Rom Bar-Nissim of Heah Bar-Nissim LLP and Jarrett Ellzey, Tom Kherkher, Leigh Montgomery and Natischa Volpe of Ellzey Kherkher Sanford Montgomery LLP.
Counsel information was not immediately available for Nvidia.
The case is Ted Entertainment Inc. et al. v. Nvidia Corp., case number 3:25-cv-10287, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
--Editing by Alex Hubbard.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
