Google Sued Again, Gemini Accused of Training with Millions of Copyrighted Works

Google Headquarters. (Wikimedia Commons)

Google is once again facing a copyright lawsuit. A number of publishers and writers accuse the technology company of copying millions of works without permission to train its Gemini artificial intelligence.

CNET quoted Wednesday, July 15, saying Hachette Book Group, Cengage, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on July 10.

The plaintiffs accused Google of taking advantage of its business relationship with publishers. Works previously available on the internet and Google Books are said to have been copied in large quantities to train Gemini without permission or compensation.

Google Books is a service owned by Google to digitize and facilitate the search for book content.

"Gemini's scale and speed in making books and competing with human writers is unprecedented," the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit.

Illustration of Google Gemini. A number of publishers and writers have sued Google for accusing the company of using millions of copyrighted works without permission to train its artificial intelligence. Photo: Pexels.

They stated that this ability was only possible to achieve because Google allegedly copied the works of the plaintiffs and members of the group they represented.

Google and the publishers' lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and Turow previously joined McGraw-Hill and Macmillan to sue Meta in May. The allegations are also related to the use of copyrighted works to train AI.

Copyright is one of the biggest legal disputes in the development of generative AI. This technology can create text, images, audio, or video after being trained using large amounts of data.

Legal problems arise when training data comes from copyrighted human works. Various AI companies are then sued for allegedly taking material from the internet or other sources without the consent of the owner.

Google has previously faced a similar issue. Disney sent a warning letter in December for Google to stop using its intellectual property.

Disney accused the Nano Banana image maker model and a number of Google video models of producing AI content featuring the company's iconic characters without permission.

The debate on AI has also penetrated the publishing industry. Hachette canceled the publication of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard in the United States after allegations that the book was written using generative AI.

The accusation sparked outrage in the book community and was considered a violation of publisher rules.

In two major lawsuits against Anthropic and Meta last year, the court won the AI company. However, both judges confirmed that similar cases in the future could result in different decisions.

"Copyright law applies to AI companies, including Google, with the same force as it does for other companies that have complied with the rules for decades," Hachette and the other plaintiffs wrote.