Ted Entertainment v OpenAI Inc

Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. OpenAI Inc. (N.D. Cal., Case 3:26-cv-02935) is a class-action lawsuit filed on April 3, 2026, by several YouTube content creators against OpenAI, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) through the unauthorized scraping of copyrighted videos for AI training.<ref name="piracymonitor">Piracy Monitor - YouTube publisher sues Apple, Amazon, OpenAI</ref>

Background

The plaintiffs—Ted Entertainment (creator of "h3h3 Productions" and "H3 Podcast Highlights"), Matt Fisher ("MrShortGame Golf"), and Golfholics—operate YouTube channels with over 6 million subscribers and 4.3 billion views combined.<ref name="piracymonitor" />

Ted Entertainment is represented by the Conrad Law PLLC, the same firm handling multiple similar lawsuits against AI companies for copyright infringement and DMCA violations.<ref name="tubefilter">Tubefilter - Ted Entertainment files lawsuits</ref>

Allegations

The complaint targets OpenAI's Sora text-to-video AI model, alleging that OpenAI circumvented YouTube's technological protection measures—including streaming-only delivery, API limits, access controls, rolling ciphers, and IP detection systems—to download millions of videos at scale for training purposes.<ref name="piracymonitor" /><ref name="chatgpt">ChatGPT is Eating the World - Five alleged TPMs</ref>

Plaintiffs identified their content in multiple training datasets linked to Sora:

HD-VILA-100M dataset: 146-285 videos<ref name="piracymonitor" />
HD-VG-130M dataset: 83-209 videos<ref name="piracymonitor" />
Panda-70M dataset: 155-283 videos<ref name="piracymonitor" />

Legal Claims

The plaintiffs allege violations of 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a), the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision, which prohibits circumventing technological measures that control access to copyrighted works.<ref name="piracymonitor" />

The plaintiffs seek:

Statutory damages of up to $150,000 per violation
Class certification
Permanent injunctions against further circumvention<ref name="piracymonitor" />

Related Cases

This is the seventh lawsuit filed by Ted Entertainment against AI companies, following prior actions against Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance, and Snap.<ref name="piracymonitor" />

The same plaintiffs filed parallel lawsuits against Apple and Amazon for their respective video AI models.<ref name="piracymonitor" /><ref name="tubefilter" />

Significance

The case tests critical questions about the intersection of AI training and copyright law:

Whether publicly viewable content on platforms like YouTube can be scraped for AI training
Whether downloading videos via technical workaround constitutes DMCA circumvention
The scope of "technological protection measures" under 17 U.S.C. § 1201

These cases could have significant implications for how AI companies source training data for video generation models.

References