You can access the lawsuit from here.
A group of publishers and authors has filed a class action lawsuit against Google in a New York federal court, accusing the company of illegally copying millions of copyrighted books and journal articles to develop and train its Gemini artificial intelligence models.
Who filed the lawsuit: The plaintiffs include Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. Inc. They allege that Google committed large-scale copyright infringement by copying copyrighted works from its own book services, downloading books and articles through web scraping, repeatedly reproducing them during AI training, and removing copyright management information (CMI) in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The complaint opens with a sharp allegation against Google, saying, “Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history.” It further alleges, “Google first illegally copied millions of books and journal articles… Google then copied those stolen works many times over to train its multi-billion-dollar generative AI system called Gemini.” According to the plaintiffs, “Google reproduced millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers.”
Use of Google’s own services: According to the lawsuit, Google copied books that had been provided for limited purposes through services such as Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar, and later reused those works to train Gemini without obtaining fresh permission from publishers or authors. The complaint argues that these services were created to help users discover, search or buy books, not to supply training material for commercial AI systems.
The publishers also allege that Google copied books and journal articles from internet datasets created through web scraping, including material allegedly obtained from pirate websites such as Z-Library, OceanofPDF, WeLib and other sources, as well as content behind paywalls. They claim Google later copied these works multiple times while converting them into training datasets and model parameters for successive versions of Gemini.
Google allegedly knew the risks: The complaint argues that Google knew the legal risks. It cites internal documents that allegedly described using “Publisher Provided [] copyrighted books” from Google Play Books as “highly problematic for Google,” warning of “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines.” Another internal assessment allegedly stated, “Book publishers [are] likely to see LLM training on their books as copyright infringement. Could withdraw their content from Google Play Books [or] file a lawsuit against Google.” The lawsuit also quotes Gemini’s lead engineer as saying, “we don’t do deals for data we…
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