Major Publishers Sue Google for Training Gemini AI on Copyrighted Books
Major book publishers Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier, joined by bestselling author Scott Turow, filed a federal class-action lawsuit in New York accusing Google of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to train its Gemini artificial intelligence model without permission. The plaintiffs allege Google secretly copied works provided for limited purposes through Google Books, Google Play, and Google Scholar, as well as materials scraped from pirate sites like Z-Library, to build a multi-billion dollar AI business that now generates verbatim copies and low-cost substitutes directly competing with original authors. The lawsuit claims this unauthorized use has caused substantial harm by displacing legitimate book sales and flooding the marketplace with AI-generated content that mimics specific authors' styles, prompting the publishers to seek maximum monetary damages, an injunction to stop the infringement, and the destruction of all unauthorized copies held by Google. This legal action follows similar copyright battles against other tech giants like OpenAI and Meta, marking the first time major publishers have directly sued Google specifically over AI training data infringement.