Google faces another AI training lawsuit from major publishers

A coalition of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E., have filed a class action lawsuit against Google. They accuse the company of using their copyrighted works to train its artificial intelligence platform, Gemini. The lawsuit claims that Google intentionally removed or altered copyright metadata from these works to "conceal… that its Gemini Models were trained on stolen materials."

This lawsuit is one of many brought by copyright holders against AI companies such as Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. While most cases are still pending, two early rulings in California courts have favored AI companies, deeming the use of copyrighted works for AI training as "fair use" under U.S. copyright law, which has not been updated since before the internet. However, Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for pirating works, the largest payout in U.S. copyright history, with about half a million writers eligible for at least $3,000 each. Many authors opted out of the settlement to pursue further legal action.

The California decisions do not set an indisputable precedent due to the nuance of the conflict. The Google case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, allowing a different judge to weigh in. The lawsuit highlights that publishers have a long history with Google, having provided copyrighted works specifically for Google Books searches, which only display short snippets and bibliographic data. Plaintiffs allege that Google trained Gemini on copies of these books and those uploaded to Google Play, without permission.

The lawsuit also cites an internal Google document stating that using copyrighted books for AI training could be "highly problematic for Google" and could result in "$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines." Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.