Major publishers Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier have filed a lawsuit against Google alleging that Google used their work to train its AI chatbot Gemini. Scott Turow, the author of crime thrillers like Presumed Innocent, has also joined the suit which is seeking class action status. The lawsuit was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging that Google “reproduced millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that its conduct violated copyright law.” Hachette is the third largest book publisher in the U.S. behind Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, the latter of which signed a licensing deal with Microsoft in 2024 to provide its books to be training AI models, according to Bloomberg.
Cengage Learning is a large education publisher that provides access to educational materials like textbooks and Elsevier is an academic publisher of journals like The Lancet and Cell. The plaintiffs allege Google illegally copied their books and journal articles, including from “known pirate sources,” to train its AI models.
From the lawsuit: The result is an AI system that competes directly with Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works in the market. Those substitutes take multiple forms, including verbatim and near-verbatim copies of portions or entire works, replacement chapters of academic textbooks, summaries and alternative versions of famous novels, and inferior knockoffs that copy creative elements of original works. Gemini even tailors outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors. Elsevier, Cengage, Turow, and Hachette all sued Meta earlier this year over allegations that it used their work to train AI. The copyright harm outlined in the suit The new suit against Google argues that Gemini creates a product that traditional publishers can’t compete with, claiming that an AI chatbot can instantly create a 100-page murder mystery in 20 minutes “for a mere $0.39.” “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 lawsuit claims.
