The owner of the popular magazine Rolling Stone, the media holding Penske Media, has sued Google. The company was accused of using materials from their publications to create AI reviews without consent. This was reported by TechCrunch, writes UNN.
Details
Google has a new legal problem: media company Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum, has filed a lawsuit against the tech giant and its parent company Alphabet.
The plaintiff claims that Google illegally uses journalistic materials to create "artificial intelligence reviews" in the search engine. Such summaries, according to the publishers, take away their audience and undermine profits.
As a leading global publisher, we have a duty to protect PMC's best journalists and award-winning journalism as a source of truth
"We have a responsibility to fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity, all of which is threatened by Google's current actions."
The lawsuit states that Google "uses its monopoly" to effectively force PMC to agree to terms that harm their business. If the company refuses, it risks disappearing completely from search results.
The only way for Penske to opt out is to completely remove itself from Google search, which would be devastating
The publisher also stated that since the introduction of Google's AI reviews, the number of clicks from search has significantly decreased. This affects not only advertising revenue, but also subscriptions and affiliate programs.
Google, for its part, denies the violations.
Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to websites across the internet, and AI overviews drive traffic to a greater diversity of sites
According to him, the reviews make searching "more useful" and create "new opportunities for finding content."
We will defend against these baseless claims
This lawsuit is one of the first against Google specifically over AI reviews, although similar claims have previously been made against other companies in the artificial intelligence sector. It comes amid antitrust investigations into Google in the US and Europe.