Publishers seek billions in Google Gemini copyright suit
Major publishers including Europe's Elsevier have sued Google for allegedly using copyrighted works to train its Gemini AI, a case that could determine how tech giants pay for content on a massive scale.
Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class-action complaint against Google on 10 July in a New York federal court. The publishers allege Google copied millions of copyrighted books and journal articles to train its Gemini generative AI system without permission or payment. The complaint labels the practice “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history.”
The lawsuit centres on works Google originally obtained for scope-limited services like Google Books and Google Scholar, where the company was permitted only to show searchable snippets or sell ebooks. The plaintiffs argue Google illegally diverted this material to train a commercial AI product. “Google illegally copied works from all these scope-limited programs for AI training, knowing it lacked authorization to do so,” the filing states.
According to the complaint, Google also relied on web scrapes from “known pirate sources” and material hidden behind paywalls. The publishers accuse the company of stripping copyright management information to hide its use of the texts, violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An internal Google document cited in the lawsuit reportedly warned that training on copyrighted books could be “highly problematic” and expose the company to “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines.”
For European publishers like Elsevier, the case represents a critical front in protecting scientific and academic content from being absorbed by US tech firms. The plaintiffs argue that Gemini now directly competes with the copyrighted works it was trained on, generating outputs from near-verbatim copies to replacement textbook chapters. As an example, the suit notes Gemini can produce a 100-page murder mystery in about 20 minutes for 39 cents. “No publisher or author can compete with that,” the complaint reads.
The financial stakes are high. The filing points out that Alphabet reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter in October 2025, linking that milestone to its AI business. The publishers are seeking statutory damages, a permanent injunction, and an order forcing Google to destroy any unauthorised copies used in training.
This legal challenge joins a growing wave of litigation targeting the AI sector. The same group of publishers sued Meta earlier this year, while authors and news outlets have pursued similar claims against OpenAI and Anthropic. While two California rulings last year favoured AI companies on fair use grounds, judges left the door open for future cases to reach different conclusions. Anthropic separately agreed to pay $1.5bn to authors over pirated copies, marking the largest copyright payout in US history. A New York judge will now weigh these latest claims against Google.
