As Key Hearing Draws Near, Publishers Defend Their Bid to Join Authors' Copyright Lawsuit Over Google's AI Training

With a key February 20 hearing on class certification drawing near, two major publishers—the Cengage Group and the Hachette Book Group—are defending their attempt to intervene in a class action copyright infringement lawsuit over Google’s alleged use of unauthorized copies to train its Gemini AI service.

The publishers' filing comes after lawyers for Google filed a blistering opposition brief late last month, urging the court to reject the publisher’s bid to join the case, In Re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation, as untimely and legally baseless.

“If book publishers Cengage and Hachette want to present ‘their own evidence and arguments’ about how Google supposedly infringed their copyrights, they can file their own case. But they do not have the right to hijack this one—two and a half years in, at the close of fact discovery, and on the eve of the class certification hearing,” Google attorneys argued in a 15-page opposition brief.

Lawyers for Google told the court that allowing the publishers to join the proposed class of authors “would massively disrupt the proceedings” and would "prejudice" Google by “injecting into the case new plaintiffs, new works, new theories of infringement and harm, and new class definitions, all just as class certification is teed up for decision.”

Furthermore, allowing the publishers to join the suit at this late stage would mean “months of new pleading challenges, new discovery, new expert reports, and yet another postponement in resolving the class question,” Google argued.

But in a filing last week, the publishers called Google's opposition "over-the-top," and reiterated that their presence in the suit was “beneficial” to the proposed class, and necessary to ensure that any harm from Google’s alleged infringement was appropriately addressed.

In their February 5 brief, the publishers insisted their intervention is timely because the issues around the proposed class action “did not crystallize” until the class certification process, noting that a motion to dismiss the case was still pending in September 2025.

The publishers went on to stress that their focus is to "ensure that the publishing industry’s discrete interests are fairly treated" in a lawsuit where "both authors and publishers’ rights are at stake."

“Google disagrees. But a class without publisher representatives risks arguments unmade and necessary evidence missing,” the publishers argued, adding that, as publishers, their “broad portfolio of copyrights gives them a distinct perspective on market harms impacting the fair use analysis.”

'Shocks the Conscience'

As Words & Money previously reported, the case was first filed in 2023 by a group of illustrators and writers and is currently before Judge Eumi K. Lee in the Northern District of California.

In the publishers’ initial motion to intervene, filed last month, the publishers said the case would address "a fundamental question of the AI era: what responsibility do AI companies have to copyright owners whose works they’ve stolen to build their trillion-dollar businesses?" The publishers pointed to a successful collaboration between authors publishers in securing a landmark $1.5 billion settlement in another author-led AI lawsuit, Bartz v. Anthropic.

An initial hearing on class certification in the Google case had previously been set for February 4, but was pushed to February 20, given several pending motions, including the publishers’ motion to intervene.

In a statement, officials at the Association of American Publishers accused Google of misrepresenting the “clear legal interests of publishers” in joining the lawsuit, noting that (as in the Bartz case) “hundreds of publishing houses” would become class members if the Court approves the class certification put forth in the case.

“The decisions of some AI developers to trample the rights of authors and publishers while raking in untold profits continues to shock the conscience,” said Maria A. Pallante, AAP President and CEO, adding that “it is important and necessary for publishers to step up to become directly involved and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with authors in the fight to protect two centuries of fundamental copyright law.”

In a recent post, lawyer Edward Lee on his blog, Chat GPT Is Eating the World, noted that the publishers would not necessarily be out of the mix if the court denied their motion to intervene, observing that they could (as Google attorneys suggest) still file their own. At this point, however, there is no indication that the publishers are looking to file their own lawsuit.