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A group of major book publishers and author Scott Turow have sued Google, alleging it used millions of copyrighted books without permission to train its Gemini AI. The lawsuit, filed on July 10, 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks class-action status and names Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. as plaintiffs.
The suit claims Google copied works from Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar—services with limited uses—and also scraped from pirate sources and paywalls. "Google illegally copied works from all these scope-limited programs for AI training, knowing it lacked authorization to do so," the complaint states Source: thenextweb. The plaintiffs also allege Google removed or altered copyright management information to conceal the infringement Source: techcrunch.
Publishers argue Gemini competes directly with their works, producing near-verbatim copies or replacement chapters. The complaint notes Gemini can create a 100-page murder mystery in 20 minutes for 39 cents, saying "No publisher or author can compete with that" Source: engadget.
This lawsuit joins a wave of AI copyright cases. Two California rulings favored fair use for AI training, but the New York court may see things differently. An internal Google document warned that training on books could be "highly problematic" and lead to $10B-$100B in fines Source: aljazeera. Meanwhile, Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion piracy settlement, though it was rejected by a judge Source: techcrunch.
“Google illegally copied works from all these scope-limited programs for AI training, knowing it lacked authorization to do so.”
“Internal documents warned using books to train AI models was 'highly problematic for Google,' and could lead to as much as $100bn in fines.”
“The suit states that: 'Google also knows that absent appropriate guardrails, Gemini will continue to produce outputs that substitute for copyrighted works on which it was trained.'”
“The lawsuit claims that Gemini instantly creates a 100-page murder mystery in 20 minutes 'for a mere $0.39.'”
“The plaintiffs also cite an internal document from Google that allegedly states that using copyrighted books for AI training could be 'highly problematic for Google' and might result in '$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines.'”