Google sued by major publishers over Gemini AI copyright infringement

A coalition of leading book publishers—Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier—along with author Scott Turow and the organization S.C.R.I.B.E., filed a class‑action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges that Google copied millions of copyrighted books, scholarly articles and other works that were supplied to Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar for limited‑purpose use, and then used those materials to train its Gemini large‑language‑model AI without permission. The plaintiffs claim Google also scraped content from pirate sites and pay‑walled sources, removed copyright metadata to hide the source, and thereby created AI‑generated text that directly competes with the original works. Internal Google documents cited in the filing warned that the practice was “highly problematic” and could expose the company to fines ranging from $10 billion to $100 billion. The suit seeks a permanent injunction, unspecified damages and the destruction of any unauthorized copies used for training. The case joins a wave of AI copyright litigation, including earlier suits against Meta and a $1.5 billion settlement with Anthropic, and could shape how generative‑AI systems are trained on copyrighted material.