It’s the latest in a barrage of efforts to win compensation from AI companies over training materials.
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A trio of publishers and one author are seeking a class action lawsuit against Google on claims that the tech company broke copyright law by using their works to train its Gemini AI. Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier are the plaintiff companies and writer Scott Turow is the individual behind this effort.
“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 complaint alleges. “Google also stripped CMI from the copyrighted works it stole to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use.”
In addition to the alleged copyright infringement for training, the complaint argues that Gemini allows and sometimes even encourages the creation of copycat works, again without credit or compensation to the authors or their publishers. The suit states that: “Google also knows that absent appropriate guardrails, Gemini will continue to produce outputs that substitute for copyrighted works on which it was trained. Yet Google has failed to implement effective guardrails.”
The literary world has made several attempts to make deals with the AI companies that have scraped and trained large language models off of their protected works. In fact, a group including several of the same parties already have a similar class action suit underway against Meta. However, cases based on copyright infringement haven’t seen much success to date. A separate group of writers landed an initial settlement of $1.5 billion with Anthropic in 2025 for a copyright infringement-turned-piracy case against the Claude chatbot creator, but it was rejected by the judge overseeing the case for being “nowhere near complete.” Similar efforts by authors to tackle copyright infringement by Meta’s AI operation fell short last year. A different pair of authors has also tried to take on Apple for unlicensed use of their creations for AI training. That’s just a sampling from the publishing world.
