Several publishing houses, including Hachette, sued Google on Tuesday July 14, accusing it of having used copyrighted works without authorization to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
“The scale and speed with which Gemini (Google’s AI model) can create books and compete with human authors is unprecedented,” they say in their complaint.
The complaint was filed in New York by Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, writer Scott Turow and his publishing company SCRIBE. They accuse Google of having “secretly copied millions of works” entrusted to its digital library, Google Books, and other services for “limited uses”, before using them to train Gemini.
They also believe that the content generated by Gemini directly competes with the authors of the original works. “Gemini even tailors its responses to mimic the stylistic elements and creative choices of specific authors,” they say. The plaintiffs are asking the court to order Google to stop these practices, as well as to pay them damages, the amount of which is not specified.
This new procedure is part of a series of copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies. Several publishers – including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier and Scott Turow – had already sued Meta in May in a New York court on similar grounds.
Anthropic, which develops Claude AI models, signed an agreement last September providing for the payment of at least $1.5 billion to authors and publishers who were suing it for illegally downloading millions of books. But a judge nevertheless ruled in this case that feeding a generative AI model with works theoretically protected by copyright did not constitute an offense.
