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New Delhi: Multiple publishers and authors, including the Hachette Book Group, have filed a class action lawsuit against Google for stealing millions of copyrighted books and articles for training artificial intelligence (AI). 

In its opening lines, the suit, which was filed in New York, states: “Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history. Google first illegally copied millions of books and journal articles to assemble a vast trove of copyrighted materials for its own commercial use.”

The plaintiffs – namely Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and his publishing house S.C.R.I.B.E. Inc. – have alleged that Google took copyrighted book and articles provided to them strictly for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar, and secretly copied them. Google, they alleged, “copied those stolen works many times over to train its multi-billion-dollar generative AI system called........

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