Penske Media, the parent company of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, filed a lawsuit against Google on Friday, accusing the tech giant of using its journalism without permission through AI-generated summaries.
The case, lodged in federal court in Washington, D.C., is the first brought by a major U.S. publisher against Google’s new “AI Overviews” feature, which places machine-generated story summaries at the top of search results.
For months, publishers have voiced concern that the tool is diverting readers away from their websites, cutting into both advertising and subscription revenue streams. Penske, a family-run business led by Jay Penske and drawing more than 120 million digital visitors each month, argued that Google requires access to its articles for AI use as a condition of appearing in search results.
According to the lawsuit, this effectively forces publishers to allow their content to be repurposed for AI, whereas without such leverage, Google would need to negotiate payments for republishing rights or for training its AI models. Penske cited Google’s dominance in online search — a federal court has found the company controls nearly 90% of the U.S. market — as the basis for its ability to set these terms.
“We have a duty to safeguard the future of digital journalism and uphold its integrity, both of which are under threat from Google’s current practices,” Penske Media said in a statement.
Post a Comment