Book Publishers Sue Google Over AI Training

The parallel suits suggest that the book publishing industry has settled on a legal strategy after watching the broader AI copyright wars produce diverging early rulings. 

In at least one instance, the tactic has worked: Last year, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle a class action over alleged piracy. Meanwhile, The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI and Microsoft is ongoing.

The licensing holdout

The lawsuit lands at a moment of heightened tension between Google and the publishing industry. 

Unlike Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic, Google has struck no licensing agreements with digital publishers, as ADWEEK has previously reported, a refusal that has pushed media companies toward once-unthinkable measures. Google does have a licensing agreement with The Associated Press, which is a wire service.

Beginning Sept. 15, Cloudflare will block multi-purpose crawlers by default on ad-supported pages for new and free-tier customers. The move is aimed primarily at Google, whose single crawler both indexes sites for Search and scrapes them for AI training. 

As a result, USA Today Inc. CEO Mike Reed told ADWEEK that the company is prepared to delist from Google Search within six to 12 months absent a licensing deal.

Publishers of both the digital and literary variety have spent the last three years searching for leverage against a company that controls their largest source of traffic. 

The commercial pressure has not brought Google to the table, so now the courts will get their turn.