A group of major publishers, including Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier, along with bestselling American author Scott Turow, have filed a lawsuit against Google in a New York federal court. The plaintiffs accuse the tech giant of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to train its Gemini artificial intelligence models.
The lawsuit alleges that Google trained its AI on copyrighted works without the necessary permissions. The publishers described the act as one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history, claiming that the company stole millions of works to build its system.
Beyond the unauthorized use of materials, the publishers claim that Google used their content to generate AI-produced material that competes with human authors. This case marks the latest legal battle over how AI developers use books and other creative works to build their systems.