Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and author Scott Turow have filed a lawsuit against Google in a federal US court in New York, alleging the Silicon Valley tech giant committed copyright infringement while training its Gemini AI models.

The nearly 60-page complaint, filed on Friday, claims that Google “willfully sidestepped” the copyright protection system. It alleges that Google first copied books through Google Books, then downloaded “web scrapes of virtually the entire internet, including from known pirate sources and from behind legitimate paywalls.”

The suit alleges that Google copied those works without permission to train its AI models and continues to do so, despite those uses allegedly falling outside existing agreements. Internal documents reportedly warned that using books for AI training was “highly problematic for Google,” potentially leading to fines of up to $100 billion.

“At no point did Google inform authors and publishers that Google was copying their works as source material to develop and train AI models,” the suit alleges. Legal expert Kirk Sigmon noted that if Google acquired books unlawfully, any “fair use” argument would be undermined.

This is not the first lawsuit against AI companies over copyright. Authors have sued OpenAI and Meta, though a judge ruled Meta’s AI training as “fair use.” Proving infringement inside a model is difficult, as “once the egg is baked into the cake, it is extremely difficult to identify it,” said Oli Huggins of Packt Publishing.

Publishers find current licensing offers unsustainable, with Huggins noting offers of roughly $10 per title for perpetual AI-training licenses. Courts have yet to determine whether users or AI systems are liable for infringing outputs, leaving key legal questions unresolved.

Source: www.aljazeera.com