Major book publishers sue Google over Gemini AI stealing millions of copyrighted works, argue tech giant will ‘weaken the incentive to create’

Some of the world’s largest publishers of novels, academic books, and articles filed a federal class action suit against Google over allegations that the tech giant scraped their copyrighted literature from the web and fed it into its artificial intelligence platform Gemini to profit from generating copies of the original works.

The publishers, including Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier, allege Google used its AI to illegally copy millions of books and journal articles and assemble a “vast trove of copyrighted materials” that it knew it didn’t have permission to use to train and create Gemini, the AI system that drives billions in profit for itself. Like other AI platforms, the plaintiffs argue, Gemini directly competes with the publishers’ work and threatens human creativity and the literary industry at large.

“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,” write the publishers in their 57-page suit, which charges Google with four counts of copyright infringement. “If left unaddressed, Google will … weaken the incentive to create.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment on the suit.

The tech giant obtained the copyrighted material by scraping online pirating sites and illegally copying books and articles that had been licensed to the company for use in its Google Books and Google Scholar databases, Google platforms that allow the public to view portions of books and academic articles, the publishers allege.

It was specifically forbidden from copying those works for other purposes, but the publishers claim Google did anyway, many times over, to train its multi-billion-dollar generative AI system. It further alleges that Google deployed a purpose-built service designed to generate content that creates direct substitutes for the publishers’ original work, such as by allowing people to type a request into Gemini that pulls up the full or large portions of the text from novels and articles, or asking Gemini to generate new books.

Those AI-generated works can then be sold, thereby competing with the publishers’ material.

“Those substitutes take multiple forms, including verbatim and near-verbatim copies of portions or entire works, replacement chapters of academic textbooks, summaries and alternative versions of famous novels, and inferior knockoffs that copy creative elements of original works,” the suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, says. “Gemini even tailors outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors.”

The substitute works that Gemini creates go beyond mere copies of specific works, the publishers claim.

“For example, Gemini can generate a 100-page murder mystery set in a quiet seaside town filled with secrets, that substitutes for an original copyrighted murder mystery on which Gemini [was] trained. And it can do that in 20 minutes for a mere $0.39,” the suit reads. “No publisher or author can compete with that. Users are already touting Gemini’s ability to generate books with ease, and the market is flooding with AI-generated substitutes.”

All of this displaces legitimate sales of books and journal articles and dilutes the market, creating an incredibly profitable venture for Google that doesn’t pay a dime to the authors and publishers behind the literature.

“The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented, and it can only do that because Google copied Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works to train its AI,” the suit says.

Internal documents cited in the suit show that Google employees noted that publishers and authors might sue the company if it used their copyrighted books and articles without their permission or without providing compensation.

“Google flagged internally that using ‘Publisher Provided copyrighted books’ from Google Play Books in connection with its AI was “highly problematic for Google,” but did it regardless, the publishers claim. “Copyright owners told Google that it was not authorized 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.”

Google could have simply bought the rights to copy the work and paid the publishers and authors, the suit says, but it didn’t, making this a classic case of copyright infringement even though it’s being used via novel technology.

“While AI technology may be new, the legal principles at the center of this case are not. Copyright law applies to AI companies, including Google, with the same force as every other company that has complied with these laws for decades,” the suit says.

With their suit, Hachette, Cengage and Elsevier join a growing number of publishers and authors suing artificial intelligence companies. Just this year, Merriam Webster Dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannica sued OpenAI and New York Times journalist filed a class action against Grammarly’s AI over similar copyright infringement claims.

Hachette also filed a joint suit with McGraw-Hill and MacMillan Publishing against Meta’s AI over copyright infringement in May.