Authors, publishers sue Google over alleged AI copyright infringement

A coalition of prominent publishers and acclaimed author Scott Turow have filed a federal lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of copyright infringement in the development of its Gemini artificial intelligence models.

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Google willfully sidestepped this longstanding system designed to protect copyrights and compensate authors and publishers through a series of deliberate choices to develop Gemini1

The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, alleges that Google willfully bypassed established copyright protections. Publishers Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier, alongside Turow, claim Google copied vast amounts of book content through its Google Books service and extensive internet scraping. They assert that this material was obtained for purposes beyond the originally intended limited scope of Google Books and other services.

According to the complaint, Google allegedly downloaded web scrapes from across the internet, including from unauthorized sources and behind paywalls. The plaintiffs contend that these works were copied without permission to train AI models, a practice that continues despite existing agreements allegedly not covering such uses.

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At no point did Google inform authors and publishers that Google was copying their works as source material to develop and train AI models

The suit further claims that Google was aware of the significant legal risks involved. Internal documents reportedly warned that using books to train AI models was "highly problematic" and could result in substantial fines. The plaintiffs argue that Google failed to inform authors and publishers about the use of their works for AI development, potentially invalidating any fair use defense Google might attempt to assert.

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It’s an interesting issue that has a lot of complex dimensions, in no small part because it can be hard to prove what was or wasn’t in a training corpus.