In a move they hope will strengthen a class action lawsuit against Google and its generative AI product Gemini, two Association of American Publishers members have asked a court to allow them to take part in the lawsuit that is now before Judge Eumi K. Lee in the U. S. District Court, Northern District of California.
The original copyright infringement lawsuit was filed in 2023 by a group of illustrators and writers. Now Cengage, an educational publishing company, and the trade publisher Hachette Book Group, are asking to enter the case to represent all publishers whose rights have also infringed by Google.
“Through today’s action, AAP and its members aim to support the creators suing Google,” said AAP president and CEO Maria Pallante in a statement. “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.”
Google has objected to efforts by plaintiffs to include publishers as part of the class in the class action lawsuit, claiming that adding publishers would introduce intra-class complexities. But the AAP asserts, pointing to the success that authors and publishers had in the Bartz v. Anthropic class action lawsuit, that direct participation by publishers would instead help address various issues so that the case can move forward.
At the heart of the lawsuit is the charge that, in the rush to build its Generative AI Gemini product, Google illegally copied millions of books rather than reach licensing deals with copyright owners. The result is a Gemini product that, the complaint charges, competes directly with books in the market.
“Gemini readily produces content that substitutes for the underlying copyrighted works on which it was trained,” the complaint states, “including verbatim and near-verbatim copies of portions or entire works, replacement chapters of academic textbooks, summaries and alternative versions of famous novels, and inferior knockoffs that copy creative elements of original works.”
Furthermore, the complaint argues, “Gemini can generate a 100-page murder mystery set in a quiet seaside town filled with secrets, that competes with and substitutes for an original copyrighted murder mystery on which Gemini trained. And it can do that in 20 minutes for a mere $0.39. No publisher or author can compete with that.”
Many Gemini users now tout the product’s “ability to generate books with ease,” according to the complaint, “and the market is flooding with AI-generated substitutes. The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented, and it can only do that because Google copied Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works to train its AI.”
Among the remedies the publishers are seeking is an injunction requiring Google to stop infringing copyrighted material as well as an order to destroy “all infringing copies of Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s copyrighted works in its possession or control.”
