Google Faces Lawsuit Over AI Training Data From Major Publishers

Google is facing a new class-action lawsuit filed by a group of major publishers and authors. The plaintiffs, including Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier, alongside author Scott Turow and the organization S.C.R.I.B.E., allege that Google used their copyrighted material to train its AI platform, Gemini. The lawsuit further claims that Google intentionally altered or removed copyright information to conceal its unauthorized use of these works.

This legal challenge is one of several similar complaints brought against major AI developers such as Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Content creators argue that their works are being used to build powerful AI systems without permission, infringing on their intellectual property rights and devaluing their content.

While some recent court decisions in California have sided with AI companies, deeming the use of copyrighted material for training as "fair use" under existing U.S. copyright law, this ruling is not universally determinative. The new lawsuit against Google has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, allowing a different judge to interpret the law in this specific context.

The publishers involved have a long-standing relationship with Google, notably through services like Google Books, which allows users to search book content. However, the lawsuit contends that the use of these works for training generative AI models goes beyond the scope of previous agreements and constitutes copyright infringement.