The parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood has sued Google, alleging that its controversial “AI Overviews” feature is ripping off articles without permission – and crushing traffic in the process.

Filed in Washington DC federal court, the lawsuit from Penske Media accuses Google of causing “millions of dollars of harm” and reaping “illegal profits.” Google mandates that publishers allow their content to be used to train its AI summary feature if they want their links to be included in search results, according to the complaint.

The result, according to Penske, is that Google is robbing publishers of the proceeds they would receive by licensing the rights to their articles or selling advertising based on web traffic that is instead gobbled up by the Big Tech giant’s AI tools.

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