IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS—Google used stock photography company’s images to unlawfully train its image generator, a new lawsuit alleges, (Jul 10, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The search engine giant also allegedly exceeded the scope of the license for photographs it had a right to use.

Google exceeded the scope of a license with a stock photography company by using the company’s images to train its Nano Banana image generator and then offering third parties the ability to use that image generator to market their own products with Google search results, a new federal complaint alleges. The lawsuit also alleges that Google used other images from the company that it did not have a license for at all, including displaying results in its search results “knowledge panel” and to train an early model of its image generation product (EVOX Productions, LLC v. Google LLC, No. 5:26-cv-07013 (C.D. Cal. Jul. 9, 2026)).

The lawsuit was brought by EVOX Images, a company that specializes in stock photographs of automobiles. EVOX and Google at first had a collaborative relationship. In January 2020, the photography company licensed its database of images to Google for vehicles in the model years 2017-2021. In an amendment later that year, Google expanded its license to include a subset of images for vehicles in later model years as well. Google used those images, among other things, in the “knowledge panel” that appears next to selected search results.

But the relationship broke down several years later. In 2025, the lawsuit alleges, EVOX discovered that Google was using far more images than permitted under the agreement. For one thing, the lawsuit asserts, Google allegedly used photographs of vehicles for model years 2000-2016—well before the time period covered by the license. For more recent years, the photography company alleges, Google used a much broader subset of images than it had licensed. The images Google allegedly used without license, the photography company alleges, include a set of interactive images (known as “spins” and “panos”) that allow viewers to rotate the photographs on their screen in order to mimic walking around the exterior of the vehicle or scanning the interior of the vehicle by looking up, down, and side to side.

As to the images that Google did license, the photography company alleges, Google used those outside the scope of its license. One way that Google did that involved Nano Banana, Google’s image generation and editing tool. According to the complaint, Google used the EVOX image as part of its training dataset for the Nano Banana product. What’s more, the complaint asserts, Google then offered business customers the ability to use Nano Banana, under its Google Ads program, to create and display ads that would accompany search results. This latter use, the complaint asserts, violated a term of the licensing agreement that forbade the use of the images in any “business-to-business commercial offering that permits Users to repurpose Licensed Content for commercial purposes.”

Google’s image generation service, the complaint asserts, also violated EVOX’s intellectual property rights in another way. One of Google’s original image generation platforms, the complaint alleges, was trained using a series of publicly available datasets managed by a German nonprofit called LAION. Although those datasets contain only links to images and not the images themselves, the complaint asserts, Google nonetheless allegedly used those links to gain access to over 16,000 of EVOX’s copyrighted images for training purposes. The complaint also includes side-by-side comparisons that EVOX says show Nano Banana generated vehicle images closely mimicking the lighting, composition and other expressive elements of EVOX's photography.

The lawsuit accused Google of direct copyright infringement for each of the allegedly unlawful uses of EVOX works. The lawsuit also alleges that Google violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing or altering EVOX’s copyright management information in connection with its training dataset.

The Case is No. 5:26-cv-07013.

Judge: NA.

Attorneys: Jason P. Casero (Callahan & Blaine) for EVOX Productions, LLC.

Companies: EVOX Productions, LLC; Google LLC

News: Copyright GCNNews