Several major book publishers and authors have sued Google, alleging the technology company illegally copied millions of copyrighted books to train its Gemini artificial intelligence models, which they say now generate content that competes directly with the original works, France 24 reported.
The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in a New York court by Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and his publishing company, S.C.R.I.B.E.
The plaintiffs alleged Google “secretly copied millions of works” that had been made available through Google Books and other services for limited purposes, before using them to train Gemini without permission.
According to the lawsuit, Gemini is capable of producing books at an unprecedented scale and speed, creating direct competition for human authors.
“The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit also alleged that Gemini can tailor its outputs to imitate the expressive style and creative choices of specific authors.
The publishers and authors are seeking an injunction to prevent further alleged infringement, as well as unspecified monetary damages.
The case is the latest in a series of copyright lawsuits challenging the use of protected works to train generative AI systems.
In May, many of the same publishers, including Hachette, Cengage and Elsevier, along with Turow, filed a similar lawsuit against Meta in New York, alleging the company used copyrighted books without authorisation to train its AI models.
Several AI companies have argued that training models on copyrighted material constitutes “fair use” under US copyright law.
A US judge last year ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its Claude AI model was sufficiently transformative to qualify as fair use, while allowing claims related to the alleged use of pirated materials to proceed. Meta also secured a partial legal victory in a separate copyright case after a federal judge ruled that its use of copyrighted material for AI training qualified as fair use under the circumstances presented.
