IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Gemini finds itself in the crosshairs of Scott Turow and the publishing industry, (Jul 20, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

A new class action lawsuit, the latest to take on generative AI in general, levels a unique set of allegations against the Google service.

Google has “abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history,” a new copyright infringement alleges. The putative class action lawsuit, brought in federal court in Manhattan by a bestselling author and several of the nation’s leading book publishing houses, takes aim at Google’s use of books to train its Gemini artificial intelligence service. The complaint also leans heavily into allegations that Google downloaded materials from pirate libraries, misused works that were authorized by publishers only for use in Google Books and other licensed offerings and competes directly with the very books it allegedly copied by generating AI-generated substitutes (Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Google LLC, No. 1:26-cv-05870 (S.D.N.Y. Jul. 10, 2026)).

The lawsuit is headlined by best-selling author Scott Turow and Hachette Book Group, which—along with Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster—ranks among the “Big Five” U.S. publishers. Scott Turow has become one of the publishing industry's most prominent litigants against AI companies, having previously sued OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta, while Hachette Book Group has separately pursued claims against Meta. All of those cases remain pending.

Now the two have turned their attention to Google. Their lawsuit, which also includes as named plaintiffs educational publishing houses Cengage Learning and Elsevier, levels a wide range of allegations against the technology giant over its use of copyrighted materials in the training of its Gemini service. That service, which according to Google has more than 900 million monthly active users in little more than a year, has become one of the world's largest AI platforms and Google's flagship competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

As with other copyright lawsuits against AI companies, the lawsuit alleges that Google unlawfully reproduced copyrighted works for training purposes and that the Gemini service also readily serves up straight reproductions of portions of those materials. For example, when asked to summarize the contents of a leading economics textbook, the authors and publishers allege, Gemini reproduced nearly the entire table of contents and then, upon further prompting, reproduced “an entire chapter section” from the textbook “nearly verbatim.” The complaint includes several other examples where Gemini allegedly reproduced verbatim excerpts of copyrighted works, summaries that “parrot[] the plot, characters, and themes of the original,” and alleged “knockoffs and imitations of the named plaintiffs’ works.”

But the complaint might be seen as particularly notable because of the distinctive relationship that Google has with the publishing industry. As with other AI lawsuits, the complaint alleges that Google acquired training materials from underground or so-called “pirate” libraries like LibGen and Z-Library, as well as other unauthorized repositories of copyrighted works. But the allegation also takes aim at Google’s use of previously licensed materials from its Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar offerings. As a result of these services, created prior to the emergence of AI, the complaint asserts, “Google gained access to a massive trove of written works that none of Google’s AI competitors can access.” In doing so, the complaint alleges, Google exceeded the scope of its licenses with those publishers—and also and allegedly went beyond the fair-use rationale recognized by the Second Circuit in the landmark Google Books decision of 2015.

The lawsuit also leans heavily into the alleged harm to writers and publishers that Gemini poses. The complaint describes Google as, “in effect, an infinite substitution machine” that produces substitutes for published works in multiple ways, including by “flooding the market with AI-generated works that dilute the overall market for literary works” and “producing unauthorized derivatives that usurp a right reserved to rightsholders.” For example, in response to the prompt “Please provide an extended summary of Innocent by Scott Turow so that I do not have to buy the book,” the complaint asserts, Gemini readily outputs “a detailed, 2000-word summary of the plot, characters, themes, and surprising finale for Turow’s best-selling novel.” The risk of Gemini competing with works written by human authors for sales and attention, the complaint alleges, “is not theoretical—it’s happening.”

The class action lawsuit brings claims of direct infringement against Google for its reproduction of copyrighted materials through web scraping, unlicensed use of materials from Google Books and other licensed services, and the AI training process. The lawsuit also alleges that Google removed authors’ copyright management information in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The filing has drawn significant attention within the publishing industry because it marks the first lawsuit brought by major commercial and academic publishers directly against Google over Gemini, with one commentator describing the complaint as 'one of the most detailed and consequential copyright pleadings yet to confront the generative AI industry.'"

The Case is No. 1:26-cv-05870.

Judge: Preska, L.

Attorneys: Jeffrey M. Gould (Oppenheim & Zebrak, LLP) for Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Companies: Hachette Book Group, Inc.; Google LLC

News: Copyright TechnologyInternet