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Google Hit With New AI Copyright Suit by Publishers
Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier and Scott Turow sued Google on July 10, alleging Gemini was trained on copyrighted books without permission.
Image: CNET
Google is facing another copyright lawsuit over AI training, this time from Hachette Book Group, Cengage, Elsevier and author Scott Turow, who filed suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on July 10.
The complaint alleges Google “cashed in” on its publisher relationships by “brazenly copying millions of copyrighted works” and using them to train Gemini without permission or compensation. According to the filing, the company drew on copyrighted material available on the web and through Google Books.
“The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented, and it can only do that because Google copied plaintiffs' and the class’s works to train its AI.”
The same publishers may sound familiar: Hachette, Cengage and Elsevier joined McGraw-Hill and Macmillan in May to sue Meta over similar claims.
The case adds to a growing pile of lawsuits testing how copyright law applies to generative AI. Model makers need enormous amounts of data, much of it created by humans and often protected by copyright, and courts are now being asked to decide whether scraping or otherwise acquiring that material for training is lawful.
Google has faced related complaints before. Disney sent the company a cease-and-desist order in December, accusing its Nano Banana AI image model and other video models of taking a “free ride off Disney’s intellectual property” by generating content featuring Disney characters.
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The dispute also lands amid broader tension in publishing. Hachette recently canceled the US release of Shy Girl by Mia Ballard after allegations that generative AI was used to write the novel, which the publisher said violated its rules.
Recent rulings have not settled the issue. In two major copyright cases against Anthropic and Meta, courts last year sided with the AI companies, though both judges signaled that future cases could come out differently. The new complaint makes that point directly: “Copyright law applies to AI companies, including Google, with the same force as every other company that has complied with these laws for decades.”
AI Editor
Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via CNET
