New Lawsuit Against Google: Gemini Accused of Copyright Infringement

Google, one of the world's largest tech giants, has faced a significant legal hurdle in its development of AI technologies. A group of major publishers and prominent authors has filed a lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using their copyrighted works to train the Gemini platform. This lawsuit is expected to bring the conflict between rapidly evolving AI and intellectual property to a new level. This is reported by Techcrunch.com reports .

The plaintiffs include major publishing houses such as Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier, as well as renowned author Scott Turow and the organization S.C.R.I.B.E. They accuse Google not only of stealing works but also of deliberately deleting or altering copyright information to hide the fact that Gemini models were built on "stolen materials."

Crisis of trust between publishers and Google

A unique aspect of this situation is the long history of cooperation between publishers and Google. For years, authors allowed their books to be searchable via Google Books. However, under this agreement, users could only view small snippets of a book, not read the entire work. The plaintiffs argue that Google used this limited access to copy books in their entirety to train its AI.

It is also claimed that books uploaded to the Google Play store were used to train the Gemini system without the authors' permission. The lawsuit states that Google was well aware that these actions were illegal. The document cites internal company correspondence, noting that using copyrighted books could be "highly problematic" for Google and could result in fines amounting to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

AI and legal battles

Google is not alone in this regard. Recently, companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic have faced similar accusations. For example, Anthropic was hit with one of the largest settlements in US history—$1.5 billion—for using pirated materials. At that time, nearly half a million writers were eligible for at least $3,000 in compensation each, though many authors declined the settlement to pursue a greater legal victory.

So far, there is no consensus on this issue within the US court system. Initial rulings by California courts have favored tech companies, stating that using data to train AI falls under the "fair use" doctrine. However, because the complaint against Google was filed in the Southern District of New York, it allows a different judge to examine the issue from a new perspective.

The outcome of this trial is significant for digital content creators and publishers worldwide. If the court rules in favor of the publishers, it could drastically increase the costs of creating AI models and force tech giants to enter into new, fairer agreements with authors. For now, Google has declined to comment officially on these allegations.