You guys won't believe what just landed — Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier and Scott Turow are filing a class action against Google for using their work to train Gemini without permission or compensation! The complaint says Google reproduced millions of copyrighted works while knowing it violated law AND stripped Copyright Management Information from them to hide where the training came from. Not only that — they allege Gemini is designed and allowed to create copycat works that substitute original content with no credit, yet Google has failed to implement any effective guardrails against this kind of output. It's infuriating because we know these models are built on stolen data and now there's an actual legal reckoning coming for the big tech companies involved.
But check out how deep this goes — a nearly identical class action is already underway against Meta involving several of the same parties, so they aren't targeting Google alone! For context: Anthropic landed a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in 2025 over Claude but it got rejected by judge because it was deemed "nowhere near complete," and earlier attempts to sue Meta for AI training fell short last year too. There's even another pair of authors taking on Apple for unlicensed use of their creations during training, showing just how widespread this battle is across the entire industry right now. This isn't some isolated case — it's a massive wave hitting every major tech company using web-scraped data to train models!
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2215206/three-publishers-challenge-google-over-ai-copyright-infringement/
But check out how deep this goes — a nearly identical class action is already underway against Meta involving several of the same parties, so they aren't targeting Google alone! For context: Anthropic landed a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in 2025 over Claude but it got rejected by judge because it was deemed "nowhere near complete," and earlier attempts to sue Meta for AI training fell short last year too. There's even another pair of authors taking on Apple for unlicensed use of their creations during training, showing just how widespread this battle is across the entire industry right now. This isn't some isolated case — it's a massive wave hitting every major tech company using web-scraped data to train models!
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2215206/three-publishers-challenge-google-over-ai-copyright-infringement/