A coalition of major book publishers and authors has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, alleging that the tech giant committed copyright infringement in training its Gemini AI models.
The litigation adds legal firepower to a publisher revolt that has, until now, played out largely through crawler blocks and negotiating-table brinkmanship.
Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and novelist Scott Turow filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking an injunction and statutory damages on behalf of a proposed class of authors and publishers, as first reported by Publishers Weekly.
The most striking allegation in the suit holds that Google trained its AI models on books that publishers handed over to build Google Books. That agreement permitted Google to display snippets, the complaint argues, not to repurpose the material into training data for a competing business.
The plaintiffs also allege that Google understood the legal risk and proceeded anyway. An internal Google document cited in the complaint estimated the company “faced $10Bs-$100Bs” in potential fines. The suit contends that the infringement displaces legitimate book and journal sales, enables cut-rate substitute works, and undermines the growing market for content licensing.
A coordinated campaign
The filing is not a one-off.
In May, a nearly identical plaintiff roster—Elsevier, Cengage, and Hachette, joined by Macmillan and McGraw Hill, with Turow again attached—sued Meta in the same Manhattan federal court.
That lawsuit alleged that the company pirated millions of works to train its Llama models, according to Reuters. Meta has denied any wrongdoing, arguing that training on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use.
The parallel suits suggest that the book publishing industry has settled on a legal strategy after watching the broader AI copyright wars produce diverging early rulings.
In at least one instance, the tactic has worked: Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle a class action over alleged piracy. Meanwhile, The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI and Microsoft is ongoing.
The licensing holdout
The lawsuit lands at a moment of heightened tension between Google and the publishing industry.
Unlike Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic, Google has struck no licensing agreements with digital publishers, as ADWEEK has previously reported, a refusal that has pushed media companies toward once-unthinkable measures. Google does have a licensing agreement with The Associated Press, which is a wire service.
Beginning Sept. 15, Cloudflare will block multi-purpose crawlers by default on ad-supported pages for new and free-tier customers. The move is aimed primarily at Google, whose single crawler both indexes sites for Search and scrapes them for AI training.
As a result, USA Today Inc. CEO Mike Reed told ADWEEK that the company is prepared to delist from Google Search within six to 12 months absent a licensing deal.
Publishers of both the digital and literary variety have spent the last three years searching for leverage against a company that controls their largest source of traffic.
The commercial pressure has not brought Google to the table, so now the courts will get their turn.