Publishers Move to Join Copyright Lawsuit Over Google’s Gemini AI Product
The case, 'In Re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation,' 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.
Perhaps sensing another potentially massive settlement, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) this week announced that two of its member publishers—Cengage Group and Hachette Book Group—have filed a motion to intervene as class representatives for publishers in a copyright infringement lawsuit that accuses Google of using unauthorized copies to train its Gemini AI service.
The case, In Re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation, 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.
“This case will 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?” reads the publishers’ motion to intervene. “Here, several authors seek to certify classes of copyright owners across the publishing industry that will put that question to Google… But publishers are not among the proposed representatives.”
The court should allow the publishers to intervene in the case, the publishers argue, to “remedy that deficiency.”
With an important hearing on class certification set for February 4, the publishers insist they “should be represented” in the case, and given a say before they are "lumped into a class without notice or an opportunity to evaluate that class.”
In their filing, the publishers point to a successful collaboration between authors publishers in securing the $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic settlement.
“In Bartz v. Anthropic, authors and publishers came together to prepare the class’s claims for trial and secure a record-breaking settlement,” the publisher filing states. “When Judge Alsup certified the Bartz class, he predicted publishers and authors would work these issues out. He was correct: those issues were addressed collaboratively, but only because the publishers participated in the action alongside the authors.”
In a release, AAP reps said that Cengage and Hachette are seeking to represent “all publishers whose rights have similarly been infringed by Google,” and that their inclusion would “provide a level of expertise and evidence that is of utmost importance in the continuing fight to hold AI companies accountable under the Copyright Act.”
As in the Anthropic case, the publishers argue that Google “took Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s copyrighted books and copied them repeatedly” to develop Gemini, including books downloaded from “pirated sources” and extracted “from behind legitimate paywalls.”
But a post on IP professor Edward Lee's ChatGPT is Eating the World raises an interesting question as to whether Google really did tap pirate sites to create a library of works to train on.
"I had long assumed that Google didn’t acquire copies of books from Library Genesis or other shadow libraries. Why? Google already has a vast database of 40 million books it manually scanned from physical books as a part of its Google Book search (and Judge Alsup later held in Bartz v. Anthropic manual scanning is a fair use and that training on books is a fair use)," the post notes. Google of course also has YouTube.
"I have no confirmation my hunch is accurate," the post adds, "but it seems like a reasonable assumption."
Nevertheless, in a statement, AAP President and CEO Maria Pallante said the case could have “far-reaching consequences” and thanked Cengage and Hachette for moving to intervene.
“Through today’s action, AAP and its members aim to support the creators suing Google, Pallante said. "We believe our participation will bolster the case, especially because publishers are uniquely positioned to address many of the legal, factual, and evidentiary questions before the Court.”
