Key Points
- Publishers Hachette and Cengage are seeking to join a class-action lawsuit against Google.
- They accuse Google of using copyrighted books without permission to train its Gemini AI.
- The lawsuit is one of many high-stakes legal battles over AI training data.
- The publishers are seeking an unspecified amount of damages. A federal judge will decide whether to allow them to join the case.
Two major publishing houses, Hachette and Cengage, are looking to join a class-action lawsuit against Google. They are accusing the tech giant of “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history” in its rush to build its artificial intelligence systems.
The publishers filed a request in a California federal court on Thursday seeking permission to intervene in an existing lawsuit brought by a group of authors and visual artists. They claim that Google copied content from their books and textbooks without permission to train its Gemini AI model.
“We believe our participation will bolster the case,” said Maria Pallante, the CEO of the Association of American Publishers. She argued that publishers are uniquely positioned to address the complex legal and factual questions at the heart of the case.
The lawsuit is one of many filed against tech companies for using copyrighted material to train their AI. The stakes are high, as these cases could shape the future of AI development and data ownership. Last year, the AI company Anthropic settled a similar lawsuit with a group of authors for a massive $1.5 billion.
In their filing, Hachette and Cengage cited ten specific examples of their books that they say Google misused, including works by famous authors like Scott Turow and N.K. Jemisin. They are seeking an unspecified amount of damages from the court on behalf of themselves and a larger group of authors and publishers.
A federal judge will now decide whether to allow the publishers to join the case. If they do, it will add even more weight to the legal battle against Google and could significantly increase the potential damages if the tech company is found to have broken the law.
