Three publishers, including Hachette, accuse Google Gemini of plagiarizing millions of books

For two years, American publishing has been refining its response to the AI giants: block the web crawlers first, negotiate next, and finally attack.Friday, Hachette Book Group, Elsevier and Cengage, joined by novelist Scott Turow, filed a class action against Google before the federal court in Manhattan. In May, the same coalition was already targeting Meta and its Llama models before the same court.

Books entrusted for search, recycled as fuel for Gemini

The heart of the lawsuit lies in a long-standing relationship of trust. For years, publishers provided their works to Google Books for a specific purpose: to enable searching and the display of short excerpts, never full reading (let alone digestion). According to them, Google fed these complete copies back into Gemini’s training, supplementing them with books from the Play Store, online libraries and pirate sites. Copyright notices were even erased along the way, to obscure the trail.

Read also: Hachette withdraws a novel accused of having been written with AI

The article pulls no punches and denounces “one of the most massive copyright violations in history”. An internal Google memo, unearthed in the complaint, even put the legal risk at tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollars in fines. The plaintiffs also describe a direct competitor born from their own pages: Gemini summarizes, rewrites and imitates authors’ styles, and can churn out a 100-page crime novel in 20 minutes for $0.39 (the most depressing value for money in publishing history).They are seeking damages and an injunction; Google, for its part, had not yet commented.

And now, how much could this cost Google?

The choice of legal venue is no coincidence: two recent California rulings found that AI training could fall under fair use, the American exception to copyright law. By moving the dispute to New York, the publishers hope for a less amenable judge, and they are proceeding with a precedent in hand. Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors over pirated books. The showdown between the New York Times and OpenAI, meanwhile, continues in court.

The case also has a distinctly French flavor: Hachette Book Group is the American subsidiary of Hachette Livre, a publishing house founded in 1826, the number one in France and the third-largest publisher worldwide (part of the Lagardère group, for context). In other words, a piece of French publishing heritage is going to war against Gemini and its 650 million monthly users. Europe, meanwhile, has already settled part of the debate on paper: since the summer of 2025, providers of large models have been required to publish a summary of the content used for training. This is precisely the transparency that the complaint accuses Google of having circumvented.

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Source: AAP