Google Dodges Lawsuit Over Web Scraping for AI Models, for Now

Google LLC defeated for now a sweeping federal lawsuit alleging the tech giant illegally scraped the data of millions of internet users to train its flagship artificial intelligence models.

Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguín of the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Thursday dismissed the proposed class action but allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaint within three weeks.

The 143-page complaint filed in 2023 alleged Google’s web scraping practices for obtaining data for its Bard AI model violated privacy, anti-hacking, and intellectual property laws.

In her two-page dismissal order, Martinez-Olguín only cited a dismissal of a nearly identical scraping lawsuit lodged against OpenAI Inc.

In that case, Judge Vince Chhabria, who sits on the same court, found the complaint against OpenAI was excessively long and meandering to a point that it wasn’t possible to determine which causes of action were alleged against the AI company.

The two lawsuits share some of the same plaintiffs, attorneys, and causes of action.

Clarkson Law Firm PC represents the plaintiffs. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC represents Google.

The case is J.L. v. Google LLC, N.D. Cal., No. 3:23-cv-03440, 6/6/24.