Three publishers, novelist Scott Turow, and his company S.C.R.I.B.E. have filed a proposed class action lawsuit accusing Google of copying millions of books and journal articles to train Gemini. This includes works provided through Google Books, Play Books, and Scholar.
On July 10, Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. joined together in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, with the Association of American Publishers announcing it on the same day. They argue that the books and articles supplied to these services were meant for specific purposes, and using them to train a commercial AI model was not one of those. The lawsuit also claims that Google copied works it obtained from web scrapes, including from pirate sites and paywalled libraries. Google hasn’t commented on the complaint as of publication, and no court has ruled on any of the claims. The main question is whether permission for one use also covers training a model on that data.
What The Complaint Alleges
The complaint brings four counts. Three allege unauthorized reproduction under the Copyright Act, covering Google Books and other Google services, web scraping downloads, and copying during training. The fourth alleges Google removed copyright management information in violation of the DMCA. The plaintiffs are asking for damages, an injunction, a detailed account of the works Gemini used for training, and court orders to delete any unauthorized copies. The filing quotes what it describes as internal Google documents, one of which called using books from Google Play Books for AI as “highly problematic for Google,” with potential fines from “$10Bs-$100Bs.” It attributes another line to Gemini’s lead engineer, who it says told colleagues, “we don’t do deals for data we already have or already possess.” None of these documents are public, and the quotes come from the plaintiffs’ filing.
Where Crawler Controls Stop
Google-Extended is the robots.txt token that covers content Google crawls from your site. It restricts whether that content can be used for future Gemini training and some grounding uses. Neither of the two sourcing methods discussed here involves that token. The books were supplied directly to Google via agreements, so a robots.txt file does not affect this process. The web-scraping claims refer to copies that, according to the complaint, appeared in Common Crawl after being hosted on pirate sites and subscription libraries. Since these copies are hosted on different domains, a robots.txt file cannot regulate them.
On June 25, Google published a policy paper arguing that training on public web data is a “transformative, non-expressive use” under fair use protections. The paper also mentions machine-readable controls, like Google-Extended, which websites can use to opt out. However, the material examined here allegedly arrived through different channels.
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