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“Google willfully sidestepped this longstanding system designed to protect copyrights and compensate authors and publishers through a series of deliberate choices to develop Gemini1,” the nearly 60-page complaint filed on Friday said.

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The case alleges that Google first copied books as source material through Google Books, claiming that the company used books it “obtained for strictly limited purposes in connection with Google Books and other Google services”. It also alleges that Google “downloaded web scrapes of virtually the entire internet, including from known pirate sources and from behind legitimate paywalls”.

It further alleges that Google copied those works without permission to train its AI models and continues to do so, despite those uses allegedly falling outside the scope of existing agreements.

The suit claims the company was fully aware of the legal risks, alleging that internal documents warned using books to train AI models was “highly problematic for Google,” and could lead to as much as $100bn in fines.

“At no point did Google inform authors and publishers that Google was copying their works as source material to develop and train AI models,” the suit alleges.

“The idea, in short, is that any fair use [a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission for purposes like reporting, education, and research in a limited scope] argument that Gemini has would arguably be mooted by the fact that they allegedly acquired the books unlawfully,” Kirk Sigmon, founding partner who looks at technology and IP law at KellDann Law, told Al Jazeera. “It’s an interesting issue that has a lot of complex dimensions, in no small part because it can be hard to prove what was or wasn’t in a training corpus.”

The suit follows a previous attempt by Hachette Book Group and Cengage in February to join a pre-existing class action lawsuit originally brought by a group of authors in 2023.

“The scope of the complaint underscores that authors and publishers are united in the goal of protecting their valuable intellectual property rights in works of fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, memoirs, and poetry, as well as educational works and scholarly articles that span thousands of subject areas and research developments,” Hachette said in a statement following the complaint.

Google did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

A wave of lawsuits

It is far from the first lawsuit brought against an AI company by authors and book publishers over alleged copyright infringement.

There is also a pending lawsuit against OpenAI brought by authors including George RR Martin, author of Game of Thrones, and the Authors Guild. In October, a federal judge denied OpenAI’s attempt to dismiss the case.

However, a different lawsuit brought by a group of authors against Meta did not go in the authors’ favour. In 2025, a group of authors led by Richard Kadrey alleged that Facebook and Instagram’s parent company used copyrighted books to train its AI models. A federal judge ruled that the AI training met the legal requirements for “fair use”.

“They [the copyright lawsuits] all typically follow the same road map,” Michael Goodyear, associate professor at New York Law School, told Al Jazeera.

“The basic claims are you took copyrighted works and used them for training. These were unlawful copies, that’s the training argument. Some also more explicitly make arguments about infringing output.”

But Oli Huggins, CEO of ExpertEdge and VP of Partnerships at Packt Publishing — a publisher whose titles have been used in an Anthropic piracy case and who told Al Jazeera he has been approached by AI companies seeking to pay to train on the company’s data — said the challenge is that once information is used for training, it is difficult to prove whether an output constitutes copyright infringement.

“Proving what happened inside a model is another fundamental difficulty. Once the egg is baked into the cake, it is extremely difficult to identify it, quantify its contribution or prove precisely which copy of a book was used. A model may reveal familiarity with a work without reproducing enough verbatim text to establish the evidentiary trail a claimant needs,” Huggins told Al Jazeera.

Huggins said the licensing offers currently being made are not sustainable for publishers.

“The economics remain deeply unattractive. Offers currently circulating can value a perpetual AI-training licence at roughly $10 per title.”

There is a wave of lawsuits across content-driven industries, including news and music, against AI companies over alleged copyright infringement as well.

CNN filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging the company illegally copied more than 17,000 stories to train its models, which generated content that was “identical or substantially similar to CNN’s content”, according to the complaint filed in May.

Last week, 17 news organisations, including The New York Times, accused OpenAI of withholding evidence in a case originally brought by the newspaper in 2023, alleging the Sam Altman-led AI company committed copyright infringement while training ChatGPT.

In the music sector, Hagens Berman, a prominent class action law firm, filed a class action lawsuit against AI music generator Suno, alleging it trained its models on independent musicians’ work without their consent.

In January, Universal Music Group sued Anthropic, alleging the Dario Amodei-led company committed copyright infringement by using 20,000 songs to train its Claude model without permission.

But there are still looming questions about who is ultimately responsible for reproduced material that appears to be copied, according to Goodyear, that the courts have yet to answer.

“If the user is actively trying to get the model to infringe, that could mean the user is ultimately on the hook rather than the AI system,” Goodyear said. “This is still an open question that courts in the United States haven’t really grappled with.” %!s()

The 18-time Grammy nominee joins a star-studded lineup that’s been swelling in recent weeks. Justin Bieber is set to co-headline the first-ever official FIFA World Cup Final Halftime Show, taking the stage with Madonna, Shakira and BTS. Chris Martin is serving as curator of the landmark extended performance, for which the Coldplay frontman teamed with Global Citizen to support the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund.

The closing ceremony will also feature performances from music artists Nicole Scherzinger, Laura Pausini and Robbie Williams. Megastar Tom Cruise and YouTube influencer and live streamer IShowSpeed will also be in the mix.

FIFA announced earlier this week that Jennifer Hudson would sing the national anthem for the final game.

"At a time when sport, culture and global attention converge, Post Malone will deliver a performance designed to celebrate the tournament’s journey and ignite the atmosphere before the world’s attention turns to the two finalists," FIFA president Gianni Infantino said in a statement.

"We are thrilled to have so many stars taking to the pitch, from both the football and entertainment worlds. The closing ceremony will set the tone for a historic FIFA World Cup final, uniting the passion of 48 teams, 16 host cities and millions of fans on one unforgettable stage."

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The World Cup Final isn’t Malone’s first rodeo performing at a major sporting event. The rapper performed at Super Bowl LVIII between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs in 2024. The game marks Bieber’s first major performance since his headlining set at this year’s Coachella. Madonna made a surprise guest appearance during Sabrina Carpenter’s headlining set at the same festival. %!s()

Avatar fans noticed on Wednesday that Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender appeared on the AMC Theatres website. A poster for the animated feature film made it explicitly clear: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was landing in theaters on July 24, one day before the film officially starts streaming on Paramount Plus.

Image: Nickelodeon/Paramount

Unfortunately for Avatar fans, the film's theatrical release will be extremely limited. According to a report from Variety, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender will have a one-week theatrical run, from July 24 to 30, and only at two theaters: the AMC Burbank 8 in Los Angeles and the AMC Empire 25 in New York City. There will reportedly be just three showings per day at each location, though the AMC website currently displays five showings per day at the AMC Empire 25 in NYC. Avatar: The Last Airbender co-creator Bryan Konietzko described the release as a "very limited, award-qualifying theatrical run" in an Instagram story.

Tickets for Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender will go on sale on Thursday, July 16 at 9 a.m. EDT / 6 a.m. PDT. The film is also showing at San Diego Comic-Con on July 24.

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, the sequel to the beloved Nickelodeon animated series, has had a troubled road to release. Originally scheduled to arrive in 2025, the film was delayed, had its theatrical release scrapped (much to the dismay of fans), and then had footage leaked. The person alleged to have leaked the film was later arrested.

At the end of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang and his allies have ended the Fire Nation’s genocidal war and began a new age of peace. But as the show’s name implies, Aang doesn’t get to fully celebrate. The Air Nomads were eradicated by the Fire Nation to keep the Avatar from interfering with their conquest. But Aang finds new hope for his people when he wasn’t the only Airbender to spend a century frozen in an iceberg. According to an official synopsis of the film, here's what Avatar fans should expect in the animated series' sequel:

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender is about Avatar Aang, the world’s last Airbender, all grown up, who learns of an ancient power that could save his culture from extinction. With the help of his friends, he embarks on a global quest to find it before it falls into the wrong hands and upends the peace they sacrificed everything to achieve.

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender stars Eric Nam as Aang, Dave Bautista as Tagah, Jessica Matten as Katara, Román Zaragoza as Sokka, Steven Yeun as Zuko, Dionne Quan as Toph, and Dee Bradley Baker as Aang’s pets Appa and Momo. Rounding out the cast are celebrity voices Freida Pinto, Ke Huy Quan, Taika Waititi, Geraldine Viswanathan, Ronny Chieng, and Ken Jeong. %!s()

It's really not that simple at all, as Witcher and Witcher 2 designer Artur Ganszyniec explained to Polish site Chip. Going open world means there's more space that has to be filled with things for players to do, and developers also have to figure out how to make all that new content work with the old content, while simultaneously figuring out how to make the old content work in ways it was never meant to.

"In The Witcher 1, many things worked because we knew exactly where the player would be at any given moment," Ganszyniec said (Google translated). "We could trigger a trigger, launch a scene, or insert Alvin between the fields and the village. In an open world, this would have to be handled completely differently."

("Alvin," for the record, is not a machine translation botch: He's an NPC who plays a significant role in both the game's major events and Geralt's ongoing problems with the ladies.)

In an open world, developers don't have that luxury: Players are able to approach locations, monsters, and puzzles in ways that don't follow the intended progression, and developers have to prepare for that or everything falls apart. It's a problem maybe most aptly illustrated by the classic "square hole" video:

Happy 4 years of the square hole - YouTube

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Ganszyniec's words provide a little bit of insight into why, four years after The Witcher remake was announced, we still don't have any concrete information on it beyond the fact that it's happening: It's a do-over that's changing the fundamental nature of the game, and that kind of ambition is not easy to execute.

That's not just speculation on his part. Aside from the fact that he worked on the first two Witcher games, Ganszyniec's most recent credit on Moby is as a narrative and story consultant on The Thaumaturge, a very good RPG developed by Fool's Theory—The Witcher remake studio—that came out on 2024.

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And despite his history with CD Projekt's groundbreaking RPG series, it does sound just a little bit like Ganszyniec is happy that he doesn't have to deal with this one.

"When everything falls into place on the map around Lake Vizima in the fifth act, one might ask a simple question: if this were an open world, would I have a boat?" Ganszyniec asked rhetorically about one of The Witcher's pivotal late-game moments. "What's stopping me from getting on a boat on the outskirts of Vizima and sailing straight to the old manor? As a player, I might be happy about that, but as a designer, I'm starting to get gray."

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill. %!s()

The deal, which was revealed today in Paris, France at the 2026 Esports World Cup, will see Faker join soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and chess legend Magnus Carlsen in the ambassador program. From now until 2028, Faker will represent the perspective of esports players across the Foundation’s international events, athlete initiatives, media engagements and leadership forums. Essentially that means you’ll see Faker pop up across almost everything the Esports Foundation does over the next couple of years.

With the initial two ambassadors in the program not being esports stars, it makes sense to bring in the most recognisable face from the world of competitive gaming. It would honestly have been a little strange if the first true esports star to join as an ambassador was anyone other than Faker, so it really feels like a perfect match for the two parties.

“You can’t talk about esports without mentioning Faker. He is the defining athlete of competitive gaming: a champion whose excellence, discipline and longevity have inspired an entire generation,” said Ralf Reichert, Chief Executive Officer of the Esports Foundation. “As our Game Ambassador, Faker represents something fundamental to the Ambassador Program: esports creates its own global sporting icons. Across EWC, ENC and NGSC, he will help ensure that the players who built this sport have a voice in shaping where it goes next.”

Bringing in Faker means that the Foundation’s ambassador program has three key pillars, all superstars in their chosen field who have transcended their game of choice to become true international icons. Chances are that a significant portion of people in the world would recognise at least one of members, with Faker bringing in a unique audience of gamers, esports fans and likely a large portion of the South Korean population.

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“Faker represents three dimensions of what esports has become,” said Hans Jagnow, Director of Club, National Team & Player Relations at the Esports Foundation. “In the T1 jersey, he is the ultimate symbol of competitive excellence: the most decorated player in League of Legends history, still competing at the highest level and adding the inaugural Esports World Cup title to a career that has defined the game. In the jersey of the Republic of Korea, he is a national hero who carries the expectations of a country that has helped shape modern esports, and who will bring that responsibility to the Esports Nations Cup. Beyond any jersey, he is a cultural icon and the voice of a generation whose identities, communities and ambitions have been shaped through games.

“It is a privilege for the Esports Foundation to work with Faker across each of these roles,” continued Jagnow. “Our responsibility is not simply to celebrate what he has already achieved, but to give his experience and influence a platform across the full breadth of our ecosystem, from the Esports World Cup and Esports Nations Cup to the New Global Sport Conference. By connecting his voice with players, fans, media, global leaders and decision-makers, we can ensure that one of esports’ defining figures also helps shape where the sport goes next.”

The deal was announced on the first day of the League of Legends tournament at the 2026 Esports World Cup, with Faker and his T1 squad taking down GAM Esports to kick off the group stage. After winning at the inaugural Esports World Cup, but falling short last year, Faker will be looking to reclaim the EWC trophy and likely add a few more to his collection over the coming years.

“Competition has shaped my life, and I am proud to join the Esports Foundation as Game Ambassador,” said Faker. “I want to continue competing for the biggest titles with T1 while representing the players and fans who have helped esports grow worldwide. Through the Esports World Cup, Esports Nations Cup and the Foundation’s wider platforms, I hope to inspire the next generation to pursue excellence, remain resilient and believe in how far competitive gaming can take them. There is still much more to achieve.”

With a career that spans well over a decade, Faker is one of the most tenured stars to play at the 2026 Esports World Cup, and will lead his team into national competition at the Esports Nations Cup later this year. There is no sign his playing career will come to an end anytime soon, but this deal makes it clear that when that time does come, there will still be a lot of demand for the experience and wisdom of one of the greatest gamers of all time. %!s()