There is a new AI lawsuit in town. It raises some very interesting questions. It's also seeking to establish a class action, and the class would almost certainly contain a lot of indie titles, which is why I am heading back to the AI lawsuit well once more.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The lawsuit is being brought as a class action by three publishers (Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier) and the writer Scott Turow against Google. Not going to lie, the storyteller in me loves the fact that Scott Turow always seems to attach himself to these cases as though he's acting out one of the thrillers that made his name. But his presence means that writers and their interests will be represented during proceedings. And that means that when rights and the harms of their infringement are discussed, creators' rights will be to the fore alongside publisher rights.
Three Google Projects in the Crosshairs
Specifically, the suit relates to three of Google's projects and products and their alleged unauthorized use in training Google's Gemini AI. Those projects are Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar. It also alleges that content was scraped from pirate libraries.
Google Books has, of course, a long history of legal run-ins. The project set out to provide a searchable database of every book ever published. The way those books were acquired, used, and then accessed by the public raised eyebrows, ending in a 2015 case that saw a ruling of fair use.
The current lawsuit uses that ruling and the terms of Google Play Books and Google Scholar to argue that each of the three programs has a very specific and very limited purpose. That, consequently, books and articles that form part of those programs can only be used fairly for those limited purposes. And that the limited purposes do not include training AI.
Two Key Issues for Writers
There are two sides to this lawsuit that are really relevant to us as writers. The first is the infringement claim, which will ride on whether training of AI can be classed as fair use. Andrew Albanese has some very interesting thoughts on this over at Publishing Perspectives, including an analysis of the lawsuit's claims about what the earlier Google Books case does and doesn't say.
Second is competition. That is, the claim that Gemini is being used to flood the market with texts that compete directly with those on which they have been trained.
Both of these matter in terms of what has happened in the past and of what is allowed to happen in the future. As the case progresses, I will, of course, update as necessary, especially should the class be established and the possibility of settlement emerge.
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