PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS HIT GOOGLE WITH CLASS ACTION — ACCUSE TECH GIANT OF USING THEIR BOOKS TO TRAIN GEMINI WHILE STRIPPING COPYRIGHT MARKS TO HIDE THE THEFT A coalition of major publishers and authors filed a class action lawsuit against Google on Monday, accusing the company of using copyrighted books to train its Gemini AI models without authorization and then deliberately removing copyright information from those works to conceal the theft. Plaintiffs include Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, novelist Scott Turow, and the organization S.C.R.I.B.E. The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, lays out an ugly sequence of events. Publishers and authors trusted Google with their books for years through the Google Books program, which was supposed to make content searchable through limited snippets only. Instead, they allege, Google fed those same books into Gemini training pipelines and scrubbed the copyright metadata afterward to obscure the paper trail. That detail transforms this from a garden-variety fair use dispute into something approaching willful infringement, which carries statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. With thousands of titles in the alleged dataset, the potential liability is staggering. This is the latest in a wave of lawsuits hitting AI companies across the industry. What sets this one apart is the allegation of deliberate concealment. Fair use arguments collapse quickly when a plaintiff can show the defendant knew exactly what they were taking and then took steps to hide it. Google is about to find out whether a judge sees it the same way. Keywords: Google Gemini lawsuit, publishers sue Google, AI copyright infringement, Gemini training data