July 10, 2026
Publishers and Authors File Class Action Lawsuit Against Google for Willful Copyright Infringement to Develop Gemini AI Models
Today, three major publishing houses, Hachette Book Group, Inc., Cengage Learning, Inc., and Elsevier Inc., and best-selling author Scott Turow filed a putative class action lawsuit against Google for willful infringement of millions of textual works to develop Google’s Gemini large language models. Plaintiffs bring these claims on behalf of themselves and a proposed class of authors and publishers.
The scope of the complaint underscores that authors and publishers are united in the goal of protecting their valuable intellectual property rights in works of fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, memoirs, and poetry, as well as educational works and scholarly articles that span thousands of subject areas and research developments. While publishers had initially intended to pursue their claims against Google for its brazen infringement as intervenors in the ongoing litigation known as In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation, the filing of this suit at this time aims to preserve the right to pursue all the claims that publishers and their authors have against Google, including important ones that fall outside the putative class in that case.
As explained in the complaint, Google illegally copied countless books and journal articles obtained for strictly limited use in Google Books and other Google services and downloaded unauthorized web scrapes of virtually the entire internet, including from known pirate sources and behind paywalls. Google further copied “those stolen works many times over to train its multi-billion-dollar generative AI system called Gemini.” Google also stripped copyright management information from the stolen works to conceal its training sources and facilitate their unauthorized use. Google then deployed its “purpose-built service designed to generate content that directly substitutes” for original works.
The complaint alleges examples showing that Google knew it lacked authorization to copy the works for AI training, including:
- Google flagged internally that using “Publisher Provided [] copyrighted books” from Google Play Books in connection with its AI was “highly problematic for Google,” warning of “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines.”
- Google identified specific business and legal risks associated with secretly training on Google Play Books, including that “Book publishers [are] likely to see LLM training on their books as copyright infringement. Could withdraw their content from Google Play Books file a lawsuit against Google.”
- Google’s internal analyses identified key “issues” around using Google Play Books to train AI, including “Restrictive licenses for certain partner Books content[]; “Publishers are sensitive about training on their data”; and “Heightened risk around fair use defenses.”
- Copyright owners told Google that it was not authorized to use works provided for these limited-purpose programs outside of the scope-limited programs for which the works had been provided, including to train Google’s AI models.
Plaintiffs are represented by Oppenheim + Zebrak, LLP and Keller Rohrback.
Read the full complaint here.