Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow have filed a lawsuit against Google in a federal United States court in New York, alleging the Silicon Valley tech giant committed copyright infringement while training its Gemini AI models.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoogle willfully sidestepped this longstanding system designed to protect copyrights and compensate authors and publishers through a series of deliberate choices to develop Gemini1,\u201d the nearly 60-page complaint filed on Friday said.<\/p>\n
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The case alleges that Google first copied books as source material through Google Books, claiming that the company used books it \u201cobtained for strictly limited purposes in connection with Google Books and other Google services\u201d. It also alleges that Google \u201cdownloaded web scrapes of virtually the entire internet, including from known pirate sources and from behind legitimate paywalls\u201d.<\/p>\n
It further alleges that Google copied those works without permission to train its AI models and continues to do so, despite those uses allegedly falling outside the scope of existing agreements.<\/p>\n
The suit claims the company was fully aware of the legal risks, alleging that internal documents warned using books to train AI models was \u201chighly problematic for Google,\u201d and could lead to as much as $100bn in fines.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt no point did Google inform authors and publishers that Google was copying their works as source material to develop and train AI models,\u201d the suit alleges.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea, in short, is that any fair use [a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission for purposes like reporting, education, and research in a limited scope] argument that Gemini has would arguably be mooted by the fact that they allegedly acquired the books unlawfully,\u201d Kirk Sigmon, founding partner who looks at technology and IP law at KellDann Law, told Al Jazeera. \u201cIt\u2019s an interesting issue that has a lot of complex dimensions, in no small part because it can be hard to prove what was or wasn\u2019t in a training corpus.\u201d<\/p>\n
The suit follows a previous attempt by Hachette Book Group and Cengage in February to join a pre-existing class action lawsuit originally brought by a group of authors in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe scope of the complaint underscores that authors and publishers are united in the goal of protecting their valuable intellectual property rights in works of fiction, nonfiction, children\u2019s books, memoirs, and poetry, as well as educational works and scholarly articles that span thousands of subject areas and research developments,\u201d Hachette said in a statement following the complaint.<\/p>\n
Google did not respond to Al Jazeera\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
A wave of lawsuits<\/p>\n
It is far from the first lawsuit brought against an AI company by authors and book publishers over alleged copyright infringement.<\/p>\n
There is also a pending lawsuit against OpenAI brought by authors including George RR Martin, author of Game of Thrones, and the Authors Guild. In October, a federal judge denied OpenAI\u2019s attempt to dismiss the case.<\/p>\n
However, a different lawsuit brought by a group of authors against Meta did not go in the authors\u2019 favour. In 2025, a group of authors led by Richard Kadrey alleged that Facebook and Instagram\u2019s parent company used copyrighted books to train its AI models. A federal judge ruled that the AI training met the legal requirements for \u201cfair use\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey [the copyright lawsuits] all typically follow the same road map,\u201d Michael Goodyear, associate professor at New York Law School, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe basic claims are you took copyrighted works and used them for training. These were unlawful copies, that\u2019s the training argument. Some also more explicitly make arguments about infringing output.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Oli Huggins, CEO of ExpertEdge and VP of Partnerships at Packt Publishing \u2014 a publisher whose titles have been used in an Anthropic piracy case and who told Al Jazeera he has been approached by AI companies seeking to pay to train on the company\u2019s data \u2014 said the challenge is that once information is used for training, it is difficult to prove whether an output constitutes copyright infringement.<\/p>\n
\u201cProving what happened inside a model is another fundamental difficulty. Once the egg is baked into the cake, it is extremely difficult to identify it, quantify its contribution or prove precisely which copy of a book was used. A model may reveal familiarity with a work without reproducing enough verbatim text to establish the evidentiary trail a claimant needs,\u201d Huggins told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Huggins said the licensing offers currently being made are not sustainable for publishers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe economics remain deeply unattractive. Offers currently circulating can value a perpetual AI-training licence at roughly $10 per title.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a wave of lawsuits across content-driven industries, including news and music, against AI companies over alleged copyright infringement as well.<\/p>\n