Publishers and authors file a class-action lawsuit against Google
Three major publishing houses, Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier, and best-selling author Scott Turow filed a putative class action lawsuit against Google for willful infringement of millions of textual works to develop Google’s Gemini large language models, Hachette Book Group announced.
As explained in the complaint, Google illegally copied countless books and journal articles obtained for strictly limited use in Google Books and other Google services and downloaded unauthorised web scrapes of virtually the entire internet, including from known pirate sources and behind paywalls. Google further copied “those stolen works many times over to train its multi-billion-dollar generative AI system called Gemini.” Google also stripped copyright management information from the stolen works to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorised use. Google then deployed its “purpose-built service designed to generate content that directly substitutes” for original works.
The complaint alleges examples showing that Google knew it lacked authorisation to copy the works for AI training, including:
- Google flagged internally that using “Publisher Provided [] copyrighted books” from Google Play Books in connection with its AI was “highly problematic for Google,” warning of “10-100 billion dollars in potential fines.”
- Google identified specific business and legal risks associated with secretly training on Google Play Books, including that “Book publishers [are] likely to see LLM training on their books as copyright infringement. Could withdraw their content from Google Play Books file a lawsuit against Google.”
- Google’s internal analyses identified key “issues” around using Google Play Books to train AI, including “Restrictive licenses for certain partner Books content[]; “Publishers are sensitive about training on their data”; and “Heightened risk around fair use defences.”
- Copyright owners told Google that it was not authorised to use works provided for these limited-purpose programs outside of the scope-limited programs for which the works had been provided, including to train Google’s AI models.
You can read the full complaint here.
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