Publishers Seek to Join Lawsuit Against Google Over AI Training

Publishers Hachette Book Group and Cengage Group asked a California federal court on Thursday for permission to intervene in a proposed class action lawsuit against Google over the alleged misuse of copyrighted material used to train its artificial intelligence systems.

The publishers said in their proposed complaint that the tech company “engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history” to build its AI capabilities, copying content from Hachette books and Cengage textbooks without permission.

Spokespeople for Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the publishers’ bid, which could increase the potential damages at stake in the case.

“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,” Maria Pallante, CEO of the publishers’ trade group the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

The lawsuit currently involves a group of visual artists who sued Google for allegedly misusing their work to train an AI-powered image generator. The case is one of many high-stakes lawsuits brought by artists, authors, music labels and other copyright owners against tech companies over their AI training.

Anthropic settled a lawsuit for $1.5 billion last year with a group of authors suing over its use of their work to train its AI chatbot Claude.

The publishers on Thursday cited 10 examples of their textbooks and other books that Google allegedly misused from authors, including Scott Turow and N.K. Jemisin to train its Gemini large language model. They asked the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages on behalf of themselves and a larger class of authors and publishers.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee will decide whether to approve the publishers’ request to join the case.

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Rod Nickel)