Jul 20, 2026 · 41 min · 12 segments
Welcome back WITS listeners! This week, join Elle and Kay as we discuss Light Me Up by Sabrina Cross. WITS Smut Scale: 🐙🐙🐙 We start off this week discussing yet another AI lawsuit. The lines…
Well, it's been a while since we had one of these, but yet another AI copyright lawsuit has dropped.
Nice.
This is a class action suit brought alongside several other publishers and is the latest attempt to keep AI companies in check.
The last few have been less than successful, essentially landing on the decision that training on legally acquired copyrighted works is fair use, but keeping and training on pirated versions is not.
Gemini's training data may or may not have included pirated books, but perhaps more interestingly is whether using the Google Books database would count as copyright infringement.
What does that mean exactly?
I want to say like 2012, 2013, which is basically like digitizing of like a wild amount of physical books and keeping a database, kind of like an archive, like a library, but not like a library.
And at the time, there was a lot of, if I remember correctly, there was a lot of questions around the legal implications of like having a digital copy of books and like tracking down the copyright holders to get them to agree to essentially the preservation of their work.
General agreement that Google's attempt to digitize books through scanning and computer-aided recognition for searching online was seen as a transformative step for libraries, but many authors and publishers expressed concern that Google had not sought their permission to make scans of the books still under copyright and offer them to users.
So two separate lawsuits were filed.
In late 2013, okay, this was kind of what I was remembering.
After the class action status was challenged, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of Google.
Dismissing the lawsuit and affirming the Google Books project met all legal requirements for fair use.
So this was like, this was a big deal.
Like this is kind of like the dawn of the internet and like digitization of old books.
And so the idea that then Google went on to use the Google Books kind of project as training for Gemini feels like very risky on their part to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We...
Had some like questionable copyright use way back when.
Let's take another bite of that apple.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, I feel like stuff like this was probably created by a well-meaning individual.
Oh,
Well, it's been a while since we had one of these, but yet another AI copyright lawsuit has dropped.
Nice.
This is a class action suit brought alongside several other publishers and is the latest attempt to keep AI companies in check.
The last few have been less than successful, essentially landing on the decision that training on legally acquired copyrighted works is fair use, but keeping and training on pirated versions is not.
Gemini's training data may or may not have included pirated books, but perhaps more interestingly is whether using the Google Books database would count as copyright infringement.
What does that mean exactly?
I want to say like 2012, 2013, which is basically like digitizing of like a wild amount of physical books and keeping a database, kind of like an archive, like a library, but not like a library.
And at the time, there was a lot of, if I remember correctly, there was a lot of questions around the legal implications of like having a digital copy of books and like tracking down the copyright holders to get them to agree to essentially the preservation of their work.
General agreement that Google's attempt to digitize books through scanning and computer-aided recognition for searching online was seen as a transformative step for libraries, but many authors and publishers expressed concern that Google had not sought their permission to make scans of the books still under copyright and offer them to users.
So two separate lawsuits were filed.
In late 2013, okay, this was kind of what I was remembering.
After the class action status was challenged, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of Google.
Dismissing the lawsuit and affirming the Google Books project met all legal requirements for fair use.
So this was like, this was a big deal.
Like this is kind of like the dawn of the internet and like digitization of old books.
And so the idea that then Google went on to use the Google Books kind of project as training for Gemini feels like very risky on their part to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We...
Had some like questionable copyright use way back when.
Let's take another bite of that apple.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, I feel like stuff like this was probably created by a well-meaning individual.
Oh,
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