Google is being sued by Penske Media, the firm that owns well-known publications like Variety, Billboard, and Rolling Stone. They assert that their business is being impacted by the tech giant’s unauthorized use of AI to generate summaries of their publications.
Other publishers and authors have already sued AI companies for the same copyright issues, even though this is the first action to target Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
Penske Media CEO Jay Penske said in a statement, ‘As a top global publisher, it’s our job to protect our talented journalists and award-winning journalism. We also have to defend the future of digital media and its integrity, which we believe is at risk due to Google’s actions.’
In the most recent complaint, Google is accused of forcing PMC to permit the republishing of its content in AI summaries and even utilizing that content to train its AI systems by using its market dominance.
The lawsuit claims that while Penske Media has allowed Google to crawl its websites in traffic exchange—a deal that helps support content creation on the web—Google has now started linking this arrangement to a new deal that neither PMC nor other publishers have agreed to.
According to the lawsuit, Google now requires publishers to make their content available for uses other than search results, in addition to allowing it to be indexed for search. According to Penske, removing it entirely from Google search would be “disastrous” and the only way to avoid this.
Penske Media has experienced a significant decline in Google search clicks since the launch of AI Overviews, according to the lawsuit. Ad revenue is suffering, and as subscription and affiliate revenue rely on users actually accessing PMC websites, this decline may also affect these revenue streams.
Although Google has defended its AI Overviews against claims that they cut traffic to publishers, the lawsuit argues that the company has failed to provide any reliable data to counter these concerns about search referral traffic.
Penske’s complaint comes after Google barely escaped serious repercussions in a previous antitrust decision. Growing competition in the AI area prevented Google from being forced to dismantle its operations, such as selling Chrome, even though a federal judge determined that the firm had violated the law to maintain a search monopoly.
Next Post: Google must share search data, but won’t be split up in a monopoly case
