Publishers sue Google, alleging Gemini trained on stolen copyrighted books

A coalition of major publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, prolific author Scott Turow, and the writers' group S.C.R.I.B.E., has filed a class action lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit accuses Google of using their copyrighted works without permission to train its Gemini AI platform. Specifically, the plaintiffs allege that Google intentionally removed or altered copyright management information on the works to conceal that its Gemini models were trained on stolen materials. The suit references an internal Google document that reportedly states using copyrighted books for AI training could be "highly problematic for Google" and might result in "$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines."

The publishers argue that Google had long-standing partnerships with them to make books searchable via Google Books and Google Play, but only for limited snippet previews, not for full-text AI training. "Google illegally copied works from all these scope-limited programs for AI training, knowing it lacked authorization to do so," the lawsuit reads. This case comes amid a wave of similar lawsuits against AI companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic. While two early California court decisions have sided with AI companies on fair use grounds, those rulings are not binding precedent. Meanwhile, Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for pirating works, the largest copyright payout in U.S. history, affecting about 500,000 writers eligible for at least $3,000 each—though many opted out to pursue further legal action.