Google is facing another AI training lawsuit from major publishers

It was created by a group of publishers and authors A class action lawsuit was filed v. Google, accusing the tech giant of using its copyrighted works to train its artificial intelligence platform, Gemini.

The group of plaintiffs, which includes Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and SCRIBE, also allege that Google intentionally removed or changed copyright information on these works to “conceal … that its Gemini models were trained on plagiarized material,” according to the lawsuit.

This lawsuit is just one of many complaints brought by publishers, authors, and other copyright holders against AI companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

While many of these lawsuits are still pending, there are two early court decisions in California favorite AI companies, and ruled that the use of copyrighted works for AI training is considered “Fair use“Under US copyright law It has not been updated Since before the Internet existed.

However, Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for pirating its works, representing the largest payout in the history of US copyright law. About half a million writers were eligible for payments of at least $3,000. However, many authors chose not to receive settlement so that they could proceed Further legal action During artificial intelligence training.

The California judges’ decisions do not bode well for how other courts view the fair use defense for tech companies, but the conflict is too nuanced for these rulings to set an indisputable precedent. The lawsuit against Google was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, giving a different judge the opportunity to weigh in on the matter.

In Google’s case, publishers have a more nuanced and long-term relationship with the company. The lawsuit explains that publishers and authors have a long history of providing Google with copyrighted works for the specific purpose of making books searchable through Google Books. These search results do not allow users to view entire books. Instead, they provide access to short excerpts from the book as well as bibliographic information. Prosecutors allege that Google trained Gemini on copies of these books, as well as books uploaded to the Google Play Store, even though it never received permission to do so.

“Google illegally copied work from all of these limited AI training programs, knowing that it lacked permission to do so,” the lawsuit said.

Prosecutors also cite an internal Google document that allegedly states that using copyrighted books to train AI could be “a significant problem for Google” and could result in potential fines of between $10 billion and $100 billion.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.