Google AI Copyright Lawsuit Risk

"This decision is another little landmark on the road towards total erosion of everyone's ability to recognize AI-generated images at face value. That's probably good for people profiting from AI slop, and bad for everyone else."

"In the spring of 2022, Google began reaching out to a series of writers...Four years later, their participation has corners of the literary world up in arms. Much of the ire directed toward participants in the Wordcraft study stems from the practice of tech companies training LLMs, often without authors' permission, on vast reams of copyrighted texts."

"One of the first lawsuits against an AI company alleging copyright infringement was filed in January 2023 by illustrator Sarah Anderson; horror author Paul Tremblay and novelist Mona Awad filed a suit against OpenAI in June of that year as well for allegedly ingesting their published work."

"The press association is urging the regulator to take action similar to a recent case involving Meta, in which the social media company was ordered to resume payment talks and put forward a compensation plan for traditional media over the use of their content by AI tools. Four years ago, France's competition watchdog ordered Google to pay for using French press articles on its platforms, including its search engine. Google was fined €500 million ($576.8 million) following the copyright dispute."

"The alliance says Google introduced these new AI-generated summaries without its consent, which it argues amounts to a breach of the 2022 agreement. The Competition Authority had already fined Google 250 million euros (290 million dollars) in 2024 for failing to comply with certain provisions of that agreement."

"The EU announced in December 2025 that it was opening an investigation to determine whether Google has broken competition rules by using content posted online by media and other publishers to train and deliver AI services without paying appropriate compensation."

"Reddit has discussed shutting off Google's access to its content for artificial intelligence use. Reddit's $60 million-a-year deal with Google is ending soon, and the companies are in talks about potentially renewing the partnership."

"Hachette, Cengage and Elsevier join a growing number of publishers and authors suing artificial intelligence companies. Just this year, Merriam Webster Dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannica sued OpenAI and New York Times journalist filed a class action against Grammarly's AI over similar copyright infringement claims."

"Internal documents cited in the suit show that Google employees noted that publishers and authors might sue the company if it used their copyrighted books and articles without their permission. Google flagged internally that using 'Publisher Provided copyrighted books' from Google Play Books in connection with its AI was 'highly problematic for Google,' but did it regardless."

"Google also knows that absent appropriate guardrails, Gemini will continue to produce outputs that substitute for copyrighted works on which it was trained. Yet Google has failed to implement effective guardrails."