Rolling Stone Publisher Sues Google over AI Summaries (www.wsj.com)

Penske Media — publisher of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter — has filed a lawsuit against Google and its parent Alphabet, alleging that the generative AI summaries that appear above search results are illegally using its journalism and siphoning traffic away from publisher sites. The complaint makes Penske the first major U.S. news company to take Google to court over its growing use of AI-generated snippets, accusing the company of reproducing reporting in ways that harm publishers’ ad and subscription revenue. The case matters for the AI/ML and publishing ecosystems because it raises core legal and technical questions about how search engines generate summaries: are they simply transformative, algorithmic syntheses (arguably fair use), or are they unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted reporting? It could influence how large language models and retrieval-augmented generation systems are allowed to ingest, attribute, and present news content in search interfaces. Potential outcomes include new licensing deals, stricter attribution or takedown mechanisms, limits on model training datasets, or changes to how snippets are produced and cached — all of which would affect search UX, publisher business models, and the rules governing commercial use of copyrighted text by AI systems.