Google “cashed in” on its relationships with publishers to share their works online “by brazenly copying millions of copyrighted works” to train its AI in violation of copyright law, a new lawsuit from publishers and authors alleges.
Hachette Book Group, Cengage, Elsevier and author Scott Turow filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on July 10. If those names sound familiar, it may be because they teamed with publishers McGraw-Hill and Macmillan to sue Meta over similar claims in May.
“The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented,” the complaint says, “and it can only do that because Google copied plaintiffs’ and the class’s works to train its AI.”
Google and lawyers for the publishers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In this specific case, the publishers are claiming that Google used their copyrighted content, available on the web and through Google Books, to train Gemini, without permission or compensation. This is a common claim among the many copyright infringement lawsuits brought against AI companies.
Copyright is one of the most contentious legal issues for generative AI. Companies making AI need vast quantities of data to make their models better. Humans create much of that data, and a lot of what humans create is copyright-protected. So when AI companies scrape this data from the open web or acquire it through other means, lawsuits abound.
Google has been sued for copyright infringement before. Disney slapped Google with a cease-and-desist order in December, when its Nano Banana AI image model and other video models were, in Disney’s words, taking a “free ride off Disney’s intellectual property” by creating AI content featuring its iconic characters.
AI has become one of the most controversial issues in publishing. Hachette canceled the US release of horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard after multiple allegations that she used generative AI to write the book, angering the book community and violating the publisher’s rules.
In two major copyright lawsuits against Anthropic and Meta, the courts last year sided with the AI companies. But both judges were careful to say that future cases could swing the other way.
In the new lawsuit from Hachette and others, the plaintiffs wrote, “Copyright law applies to AI companies, including Google, with the same force as every other company that has complied with these laws for decades.”
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