This is the latest in a series of efforts to seek compensation from AI companies for training materials.
A trio of publishers and an author are seeking a class-action lawsuit against Google on the grounds that the tech company violated copyright law by using their works to train its Gemini AI. Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier are the plaintiff companies, and writer Scott Turow is the person behind the effort.
“Google reproduced millions of copyrighted works without authorization, without providing any compensation to the authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that its conduct violated copyright law,” the complaint alleges. “Google also withdrew from CMI the copyrighted works it had stolen to conceal its educational sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
In addition to the alleged copyright infringement for the course, the complaint argues that Gemini authorizes and sometimes even encourages the creation of copied works, again without credit or compensation to the authors or their publishers. The suit states that: “Google also knows that in the absence of appropriate safeguards, Gemini will continue to produce results that are a substitute for the copyrighted works on which it was trained. Yet Google has failed to put effective safeguards in place.”
The literary world has repeatedly tried to strike deals with AI companies that have extracted and trained large linguistic models from their copyrighted works. In fact, a group including many of the same parties already has a similar class action lawsuit pending against Meta. However, cases based on copyright infringement have not been very successful so far. A separate group of writers won an initial $1.5 billion settlement with Anthropic in 2025 for a copyright infringement-turned-piracy case against chatbot creator Claude, but it was thrown out by the judge overseeing the case because it was “far from over.” Similar efforts by authors to combat copyright infringement by Meta’s AI operations failed last year. Two other authors also tried to take on Apple for unlicensed use of their creations for AI training. This is just a sample of the publishing world.
