A fresh wave of litigation has pushed the number of US copyright cases targeting artificial intelligence to 100, after a group of YouTube creators filed suit late last week against Apple, OpenAI and Amazon, according to MLex. The new claims add to an increasingly crowded docket in which rights holders are testing whether model training on copyrighted material can be justified as fair use.

The lawsuits are part of a broader scramble by creators and publishers to respond to a legal landscape that remains unsettled. With no clear appellate ruling on the central question, many copyright owners are now pursuing licensing discussions alongside litigation, hoping to secure compensation while the courts work through the first generation of AI disputes.

That shift reflects the uncertainty left by early district court rulings and by the Copyright Office’s recent guidance. In January, the office said works that use AI as a tool can still be protected if there is sufficient human authorship, while purely machine-generated output remains outside copyright protection. In separate commentary published in April 2025, the office also stressed that human creativity continues to matter at the core of copyright law.

The latest complaints underscore how quickly the conflict has widened beyond text and images to video. According to the allegations reported by Piracy Monitor, the plaintiffs, Ted Entertainment and Golfholics, say their YouTube content was scraped without permission to help train AI systems. As more creators turn to both the courts and licensing talks, the industry is being forced to confront a basic question that remains unanswered: who, if anyone, should pay when copyrighted works become training data.

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Source: Noah Wire Services