Authors, publishers sue Google over alleged AI copyright infringement
Hachette and Elsevier lead US legal action against Google, alleging misuse of books for Gemini AI model training. Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and
Hachette and Elsevier lead US legal action against Google, alleging misuse of books for Gemini AI model training. Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow have filed a lawsuit against Google in a federal United States court in New York, alleging the Silicon Valley tech giant committed copyright infringement while training its Gemini AI models. “Google willfully sidestepped this longstanding system designed to protect copyrights and compensate authors and publishers through a series of deliberate choices to develop Gemini1,” the nearly 60-page complaint filed on Friday said. The case alleges that Google first copied books as source material through Google Books, claiming that the company used books it “obtained for strictly limited purposes in connection with Google Books and other Google services”. It also alleges that Google “downloaded web scrapes of virtually the entire internet, including from known pirate sources and from behind legitimate paywalls”. It further alleges that Google copied those works without permission to train its AI models and continues to do so, despite those uses allegedly falling outside the scope of existing agreements. The suit claims the company was fully aware of the legal risks, alleging that internal documents warned using books to train AI models was “highly problematic for Google,” and could lead to as much as $100bn in fines. “At no point did Google inform authors and publishers that Google was copying their works as source material to develop and train AI models,” the suit alleges. “The idea, in short, is that any fair use [a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission for purposes like reporting, education, and research in a limited scope] argument that Gemini has would arguably be mooted by the fact that they allegedly acquired the books unlawfully,” Kirk Sigmon, founding partner who looks at technology and IP law at KellDann Law, told Al Jazeera.
“It’s an interesting issue that has a lot of complex dimensions, in no small part because it can be hard to prove what was or wasn’t in a training corpus.” The suit follows a previous attempt by Hachette Book Group and Cengage in February to join a pre-existing class action lawsuit originally brought by a group of authors in 2023. “The scope of the complaint underscores that authors and publishers are united in the goal of protecting their valuable intellectual property rights in works of fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, memoirs, and poetry, as well as educational works and scholarly articles that span thousands of subject areas and research developments,” Hachette said in a statement following the complaint. Google did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment. A wave of lawsuits It is far from the first lawsuit brought against an AI company by authors and book publishers over alleged copyright infringement. There is also a pending lawsuit against OpenAI brought by authors including George RR Martin, author of Game of Thrones, and the Authors Guild. In October, a federal judge denied OpenAI’s attempt to dismiss the case. However, a different lawsuit brought by a group of authors against Meta did not go in the authors’ favour. In 2025, a group of authors led by Richard Kadrey alleged that Facebook and Instagram’s parent company used copyrighted books to train its AI models. A federal judge ruled that the AI training met the legal requirements for “fair use”. “They [the copyright lawsuits] all typically follow the same road map,” Michael Goodyear, associate professor at New York Law School, told Al Jazeera.
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