Three of the world’s largest publishing houses—Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier—plus bestselling author Scott Turow have taken Google to court. Their complaint, filed as a class‑action lawsuit, claims the tech giant violated U.S. copyright law by feeding millions of protected works into its Gemini artificial‑intelligence model without securing permission or offering any compensation.

According to the filing, Google not only copied the texts but also stripped the copyrighted material of its management information, a step the plaintiffs say was intended to hide the source of the training data. The complaint further argues that Gemini lacks effective guardrails, allowing the system to produce outputs that closely mimic the original works, effectively creating “copy‑cat” content that competes with the authors and publishers.

“Google reproduced millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that its conduct violated copyright law,” the suit reads. It adds that Google “also knows that absent appropriate guardrails, Gemini will continue to produce outputs that substitute for copyrighted works on which it was trained.”

The filing arrives amid a broader push by the publishing industry to hold AI developers accountable for the use of copyrighted material in training large language models. A similar class‑action suit against Meta’s AI offerings is already underway, involving many of the same parties.

Earlier attempts to resolve such disputes through settlements have produced mixed results. In 2025, a group of writers secured a $1.5 billion settlement from Anthropic, the creator of the Claude chatbot, over comparable copyright claims. However, a judge later rejected the agreement, deeming it “nowhere near complete.” Other efforts to sue Meta and Apple over unlicensed use of copyrighted works have also faltered.Google has not yet responded to requests for comment. The plaintiffs say the lawsuit seeks damages for past infringement and demands that Google implement robust safeguards to prevent future violations.

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