Major book publisher Hachette Book Group and bestselling author Scott Turow joined educational publisher Cengage Learning and scientific publisher Elsevier in filing a lawsuit against Google on Friday, accusing the tech giant of using millions of copyrighted books and journal articles without their permission to build its Gemini artificial intelligence models.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims Google built its AI by copying books and other written works from a variety of sources — including Google Books, online libraries and allegedly pirated websites — without paying or obtaining permission from the authors and publishers who own them.
“Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil,’” the complaint states, accusing the company of carrying out “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history.”
The plaintiffs include Hachette, one of the world’s largest book publishers; Elsevier, the publisher of scientific journals including “The Lancet” and “Cell”; Cengage, a leading educational publisher; and Turow, the bestselling author of “Presumed Guilty” and “Presumed Innocent.” They argue Google built a multibillion-dollar AI business by using their work while bypassing a growing market in which AI companies pay publishers to license content for training.
The lawsuit also argues Gemini now competes directly with the books it learned from by generating detailed summaries, textbook-style explanations and other written content that could reduce demand for the original materials. The complaint cites examples involving Turow’s novels and Cengage textbooks to illustrate their claim.
The publishers are seeking damages and a court order preventing Google from continuing the alleged copyright infringement. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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