New Delhi, July 15 -- NEW YORK - Scott Turow spent four decades writing legal thrillers. This week, he became a plaintiff in one. The novelist joined a class action lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier, along with the literary advocacy organization S.C.R.I.B.E., accusing Google of using copyrighted books to train its Gemini artificial intelligence platform without authorization or compensation.

The complaint rests on a specific factual claim. Publishers gave Google access to their books for Google Books, a limited-preview search tool designed to display only brief text snippets. The plaintiffs argue Google took that narrowly scoped access and fed the same mat...