Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin just granted Google’s motion to dismiss the amended complaint in Leovy v. Google, a case involving social media posts (which was consolidated with the artists’ lawsuit Zhang v. Google).
The Judge ruled: “In light of the concerns expressed by Judge Chhabria in his order dismissing the complaint in the matter of Cousart v. OpenAI LP, No. 23-cv-4557-VC,1 and given the overlap in the plaintiffs named, the involved plaintiffs’ counsel, and the claims asserted in this case and Cousart, Google’s motion to dismiss Plaintiffs’ amended complaint is GRANTED. Plaintiffs shall file a second amended complaint within 21 days of this order.”
It sounds like Leovy will amend the complaint to fix the deficiencies. But, thus far, Google has largely escaped the copyright lawsuits. Millette v. Google was voluntarily dismissed. The Leovy case has been dismissed without prejudice here. That leaves Zhang v. Google involving visual artists. By contrast, OpenAI faces 13 lawsuits in MDL litigation.
Interestingly, there are no book author lawsuits against Google, so it might be unclear whether books were even used to train Gemini.