Cengage and Hachette File Motion to Join Class-Action Lawsuit Against Google

Cengage Learning and Hachette Book Group have filed a motion to join a class-action lawsuit currently before a US District Court. The suit, In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation, was originally brought by a group of writers and illustrators in 2023. Cengage and Hachette, both members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), are seeking to represent all publishers whose content has been used to train Google’s Gemini in the case.

The lawsuit may seem reminiscent of others brought against Meta and Anthropic; as Jonathan Woahn of cashmere.io recently noted in the Scholarly Kitchen, the courts in those cases seemed inclined to view using copyrighted works to train AI models as Fair Use. Describing the “core legal challenge in these cases,” Woahn writes, “Unless a model regurgitates copyrighted text, plaintiffs struggle to prove the kind of market harm required to win.” What makes the motion made by Cengage and Hachette notable in this context is their allegation that Gemini outputs include verbatim or near-verbatim passages from copyrighted works. 

Maria Pallante, President and CEO of AAP, stated, “It is understandable that technology companies may want or need creative works to build safe, useful, and compelling AI systems, but this realization should point to a licensing conversation, not a rationalization. Let’s move past these early, free-for-all days of AI development, and get back to the symbiotic partnerships that have always been a hallmark of copyright law.”

See the AAP website for their announcement and Publishers Weekly for additional coverage.