United States District Court, New York: Hachette Book Group Inc., Cengage Learning Inc., Elsevier Inc., bestselling author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E., Inc. have filed a proposed class action against Google LLC alleging large-scale copyright infringement in connection with the development and training of Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence models. The plaintiffs allege violations of the US Copyright Act, 1976 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 1998 and seek damages, injunctive relief and other remedies.
Claims Raised in the Complaint
1. Alleged Use of Content from Google Books and Other Google Services
The plaintiffs allege that Google copied copyrighted books and articles obtained through Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar for purposes beyond those for which the content had originally been supplied. According to the complaint, authors and publishers never authorised Google to use such materials for AI development and training.
2. Alleged Use of Web-Scraped and Pirated Content
The complaint further alleges that Google used web-scraped datasets, including datasets derived from Common Crawl and Google’s C4 dataset. The plaintiffs contended that such datasets contained copyrighted works copied from pirate websites, online repositories and subscription-based services, resulting in additional unauthorised reproductions of copyrighted works.
3. Alleged Copyright Infringement Through AI Training
A central allegation of the complaint is that Google reproduced copyrighted works while developing and training Gemini models. The plaintiffs contend that the training process necessarily requires copying works into memory, processing them, tokenising them and repeatedly reproducing them as part of model development. According to the complaint, these acts constitute separate infringements of the copyright holders’ exclusive reproduction rights.
4. Alleged Removal of Copyright Management Information
The plaintiffs additionally allege that Google removed or altered copyright management information (CMI), including copyright notices, author names and ownership information. They contend that such conduct violated Section 1202(b) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and made it more difficult for copyright owners to identify the use of their works in AI systems.
5. Alleged Market Harm
According to the complaint, Google’s activities harmed the plaintiffs by displacing legitimate sales, undermining licensing opportunities for AI training, and generating outputs that allegedly function as substitutes for books, textbooks, journal articles, study guides, summaries, sequels and other derivative works. The plaintiffs assert that a growing commercial market exists for licensing copyrighted content for AI training and that Google used their works without participating in that licensing market.
Proposed Class and Relief Sought
The plaintiffs seek certification of a class comprising legal or beneficial owners of registered copyrights in books and journal articles that Google allegedly reproduced without authorisation through Google Books and other Google services, the downloading of web-scraped datasets, or the development and training of Gemini models. They seek declarations that Google violated the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, along with injunctive relief restraining further infringement. The complaint further seeks statutory damages or, alternatively, actual damages and profits attributable to the alleged infringement, disclosure of Gemini’s training materials and training methods, destruction of allegedly infringing copies under court supervision, and an award of attorneys’ fees and costs.
[Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Google LLC, Case No. 26-cv-5870, filed on 10-7-2026]
