A group of publishers and authors has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of using their copyrighted material to train its AI platform, Gemini.
According to the complaint, the plaintiffs, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and SCRIBE, also allege that Google intentionally removed or altered the copyright information on these works to “conceal that the Gemini model was trained on stolen material.”
This lawsuit is just one of many complaints publishers, authors, and other copyright holders have filed against AI companies such as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Although many of these cases are still pending, two early court decisions in California favored AI companies, ruling that the use of copyrighted material for AI training is considered “fair use” under U.S. copyright law, which has not been updated since before the existence of the Internet.
However, Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for copyright infringement of the works covered by the training, the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright law. Approximately 500,000 writers were eligible for payments of at least $3,000. However, many authors declined to accept the settlement money in order to pursue further legal action regarding AI training.
The California justices’ decisions do not bode well for how other courts will view tech companies’ fair use defenses, but the conflict is too sensitive for these decisions to establish an uncontroversial precedent. The lawsuit against Google was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and another judge was given an opportunity to weigh in.
In Google’s case, publishers have a more nuanced long-term relationship with the company. The complaint explains that publishers and authors have a long history of providing copyrighted works to Google for the specific purpose of making books searchable on Google Books. These search results do not allow users to view the entire book. Instead, it provides access to short snippets of books along with bibliographic information. Plaintiffs allege that Google trained Gemini on copies of these books and on books uploaded to the Google Play Store, even though they did not have permission to do so.
“Google illegally copied copyrighted material from all of its limited-scope programs for AI training, knowing that it did not have permission to do so,” the complaint says.
The plaintiffs also cite an internal Google document that allegedly states that using copyrighted books for AI training could be “very problematic for Google” and “could result in fines ranging from $10 billion to $100 billion.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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