A group of publishers and authors has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of using their copyrighted works to train its Gemini platform.
The plaintiffs include Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. They also allege that Google intentionally removed or altered copyright information on these works to conceal that its Gemini Models were trained on stolen materials.
This is one of many complaints filed against AI companies such as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
While many of these cases remain pending, two early court decisions in California have favoured the tech firms. Judges ruled that using copyrighted works for AI training counts as fair use under U.S. copyright law, which has not been updated since before the internet existed.
Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for pirating the works it trained on. This marked the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright law. Around half a million writers were eligible for payments of at least $3,000. However, many authors opted out of receiving the settlement so that they could pursue further legal action over AI training.
The California judges’ decisions do not bode well for how other courts may view the tech companies’ fair use defence, but the conflict is too nuanced for these rulings to establish an inarguable precedent. The lawsuit against Google was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, giving a different judge the opportunity to weigh in.
In the Google case, the publishers have a more nuanced, long-term relationship with the company. The lawsuit explains that publishers and authors have a long history of providing Google with copyrighted works for the specific purpose of making books searchable through Google Books. These search results do not allow users to view entire books. Instead, they provide access to short snippets of the book along with bibliographic information. The plaintiffs claim that Google trained Gemini on copies of these books, as well as books uploaded to the Google Play store, even though it never received permission to do so.
“Google illegally copied works from all these scope-limited programs for AI training, knowing it lacked authorization to do so,” the lawsuit reads.
The plaintiffs also cite an internal document from Google that allegedly states that using copyrighted books for AI training could be “highly problematic for Google” and might result in “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
What it means
Authors and publishers who have long relied on Google for book discovery now face the prospect of losing access to search snippets if the court rules against the tech giant. The stakes involve whether decades of established practice can be overturned by a new AI model.
