Three book publishers and the American author Scott Turow have filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging the technology giant breached platform agreements by using copyrighted digital books to train its artificial intelligence models, per bookriot.com.
The legal action focuses specifically on the sourcing of the texts rather than broader copyright principles.
The plaintiffs allege that Google extracted literary works from Google Scholar, Google Books and the Google Play bookstore, using them outside of the specific parameters agreed upon for those platforms.
According to the lawsuit, Google’s internal discussions prior to the training process highlighted that utilising these platforms to feed its AI models would open the company to significant litigation risks.
Unlike other ongoing legal battles in the creative industries, this case does not address whether training AI on legally acquired books constitutes “fair use”. Instead, it rests on the narrower, contract-based argument that Google directly violated its own platform terms of service.