Google is facing a new copyright lawsuit filed by a coalition of major publishers and bestselling author Scott Turow over allegations that its Gemini AI models were trained on millions of copyrighted books and articles without permission.<\/p>\n
The class-action complaint was filed on 10 July 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs include Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, novelist Scott Turow, and his imprint S.C.R.I.B.E. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges over the use of copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence models.<\/p>\n
According to the complaint, the publishers had supplied books to Google Books and the Google Play Store for limited purposes, including searchable snippets and not full-text access. The lawsuit alleges that Google copied these works, along with material sourced from pirate websites and paywalled platforms, to train its Gemini AI models.<\/p>\n
The complaint further alleges that Google stripped or altered copyright management information to conceal the use of copyrighted material. It also claims that Gemini is capable of generating content, including full-length novels and textbook-style explainers, that directly competes with the original works. One allegation in the filing states that Gemini can produce a 100-page murder mystery novel in approximately 20 minutes for roughly USD 0.39.<\/p>\n
The filing also cites an internal Google document that reportedly described the practice as “highly problematic” and warned of potential fines ranging between USD 10 billion and USD 100 billion.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit follows similar legal action against AI companies over their training practices. The same group of publishers had sued Meta in May 2026 over allegations involving its Llama models. Google is also facing a separate consolidated case, In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation, in Northern California.<\/p>\n
The complaint notes that Hachette and Cengage had initially sought to join the California case but later withdrew in order to preserve broader claims and avoid statute-of-limitations issues.<\/p>\n
While earlier California rulings involving Meta and Anthropic sided with AI companies on fair-use grounds, Anthropic separately agreed to a USD 1.5 billion settlement related to pirated training material. Since the present lawsuit has been filed in New York, a different court will determine how fair use applies to AI training in this case.<\/p>\n
Commenting on the lawsuit, Maria Pallante, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Association of American Publishers, said the case carries “far-reaching consequences” for authors’ and publishers’ rights.<\/p>\n
Google had not publicly commented on the lawsuit at the time of reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google is facing a new copyright lawsuit filed by a coalition of major publishers and bestselling author Scott…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[9439,25,54744,20709,50000,48204,2408,3234,132,1430,54745,54746],"class_list":["post-107313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai-training-data","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-cengage-learning","tag-copyright-infringement","tag-copyright-lawsuit","tag-elsevier","tag-gemini","tag-gemini-ai","tag-google","tag-google-gemini","tag-hachette-book-group","tag-scott-turow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}