A coalition of major book publishers and authors has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, alleging that the tech giant committed copyright infringement in training its Gemini AI models.
The litigation adds legal firepower to a publisher revolt that has, until now, played out largely through crawler blocks and negotiating-table brinkmanship.
Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and novelist Scott Turow filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking an injunction and statutory damages on behalf of a proposed class of authors and publishers, as first reported by Publishers Weekly.
The most striking allegation in the suit holds that Google trained its AI models on books that publishers handed over to build Google Books. That agreement permitted Google to display snippets, the complaint argues, not to repurpose the material into training data for a competing business.
The plaintiffs also allege that Google understood the legal risk and proceeded anyway. An internal Google document cited in the complaint estimated the company “faced $10Bs-$100Bs” in potential fines.
The suit contends that the infringement displaces legitimate book and journal sales, enables cut-rate substitute works, and undermines the growing market for content licensing.
A coordinated campaign
The filing is not a one-off.
In May, a nearly identical plaintiff roster—Elsevier, Cengage, and Hachette, joined by Macmillan and McGraw Hill, with Turow again attached—sued Meta in the same Manhattan federal court.
That lawsuit alleged that the company pirated millions of works to train its Llama models, according to Reuters. Meta has denied any wrongdoing, arguing that training on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use.
