Three major publishers and bestselling author Scott Turow have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to train its Gemini AI models1.
The case, filed in federal court in New York, was brought by Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier. The plaintiffs described Google's alleged conduct as "one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history".
The lawsuit centers on the claim that Google used copyrighted book content without authorization to build Gemini. The complaint targets the training process itself — the ingestion of protected works to develop the AI system's capabilities2.
ANALYSIS The plaintiff group spans trade publishing (Hachette Book Group), academic and educational publishing (Cengage Learning and Elsevier), and individual authorship (Scott Turow), representing a broad cross-section of the publishing industry. ANALYSIS The breadth of the coalition and the scale of the allegation — millions of copyrighted books — frame this as a test of whether large-scale AI training on copyrighted material constitutes infringement under federal law.