Google is facing another lawsuit alleging that its AI has infringed copyright

A new lawsuit filed by publishers and authors alleges that Google “took advantage” of its relationships with publishers to share their works online “by brazenly copying millions of copyrighted works” to train its artificial intelligence to violate copyright law.

Hachette Book Group, Cengage, Elsevier and author Scott Turow The lawsuit was filed In the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on July 10. If these names sound familiar, it might be because they’ve teamed up with publishers McGraw-Hill and Macmillan to… Meta is being sued over similar allegations in May.

“The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented, and it can only do so because Google copied Plaintiffs’ and class actions to train its own AI,” the complaint says.

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

In this particular case, the publishers claim that Google used its copyrighted content, available on the web and through Google Books, to train Gemini, without permission or compensation. This is a common claim among many copyright infringement lawsuits filed against AI companies.

Copyright is one of the most controversial legal issues for generative AI. Companies creating artificial intelligence need huge amounts of data to improve their models. Much of that data is created by humans, and much of what humans create is protected by copyright. So, when AI companies collect this data from the open internet or obtain it through other means, lawsuits abound.

Google has been sued for copyright infringement before. Disney Google was slapped with a cease and desist order In December, when Nano banana Other AI image models and video models were, in Disney’s words, “leveraging Disney’s intellectual property” by creating AI content featuring their iconic characters.

Artificial intelligence has become one of the most controversial issues in publishing. Hachette canceled the US release of Shy Girl horror novel by Mia Ballard After several allegations that she used generative artificial intelligence to write the book, angering the book community and violating the publisher’s rules.

In two major copyright lawsuits Anthropic and deadLast year, courts sided with artificial intelligence companies. But both judges were careful to say that future cases could swing the other way.

In the new lawsuit filed by Hachette and others, the plaintiffs write: “Copyright law applies to AI companies, including Google, with the same force as it applies to any other company that has complied with these laws for decades.”