The publishing powerhouse behind Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard is suing Alphabet Inc.’s Google for allegedly using their content illegally to create artificial intelligence (AI) summaries.
Penske Media Corporation (PMC) — which also owns the Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum — is believed to be the first such suit against Google and its parent company. Copyright-infringement lawsuits over AI training have hit the industry like a tornado, with publishers and authors taking legal action against Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. (Anthropic recently settled a class-action suit with three authors, though terms of the agreement remain unresolved.)
The lawsuit claims Google “wield(s) its monopoly to coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC’s content in AI Overviews” and uses that content to train its AI models. Last year, Google launched AI Overviews, a feature integrated into Google Search that produces AI-generated summaries of search results.
While PMC acknowledges it lets Google 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.”
In Europe, Google faces an antitrust complaint for its AI Overviews.
“As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC’s best-in-class journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth,” Penske Media CEO Jay Penske said in a statement. “Furthermore, we have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity — all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions.”
A Google spokesperson said 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,” Google spokesman José Castañeda said. “We will defend against these meritless claims.”
PMC’s lawsuit is the latest antitrust litigation to dog Google, which recently avoided divesting Chrome as a punitive remedy following its loss last year in a federal case. Although the Justice Department successfully convinced a federal judge that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, the same judge did not order the company to sell off its businesses including Chrome.
Judge Amit Mehta decided divestiture was unnecessary because AI-powered search has diversified and broadened the market.
