Google faces a new lawsuit accusing the company of illegally using news publishers’ content to create AI summaries that damage their business.
The lawsuit comes from Penske Media (PMC), which owns industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum. While Penske’s suit is the first targeting Google and its parent company Alphabet over showing AI-generated summaries in search, both publishers and authors have sued other AI companies over related copyright concerns.
Since launching its AI Overviews last year, Google has been criticized for threatening the business models of the same publishers it relies on to provide the content needed to create accurate AI summaries and answers.
The new lawsuit goes farther by accusing Google of continuing to “wield its monopoly to coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC’s content in AI Overviews” and to use that content to train its AI models.
Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement that AI Overviews make Google search “more helpful” and create “new opportunities for content to be discovered.”
“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites,” Castañeda said. “We will defend against these meritless claims.”
The lawsuit argues that while Penske allows Google to crawl its websites in an “exchange of access for traffic” that is “the fundamental bargain that supports the production of content for the open commercial Web,” Google has recently “begun to tie its participation in this bargain to another transaction to which PMC and other publishers do not willingly consent.”
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“As a condition of indexing publisher content for search, Google now requires publishers to also supply that content for other uses that cannibalize …