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Google’s use of press articles in its Gemini chatbot could violate copyright rules under certain circumstances, an adviser to Europe’s highest court said on Tuesday.
Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered the opinion in a case involving Hungarian website operator Like Company and Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot.
The case examines how Gemini retrieves and reuses news publications when it generates answers to users’ questions.
A ruling against Google could have major implications for online publishers. News organisations say AI-generated summaries reduce visits to their websites. These summaries increasingly replace traditional search results and links to original articles.
Szpunar said chatbots could infringe publishers’ rights when they retrieve articles, reuse their content and present the material in answers.
“When an LLM (large language model)-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a press publisher’s website, reuses that publication to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, the press publisher’s right may be infringed in certain circumstances,” he said, according to a court statement.
He explained that publishers could challenge chatbot use when services unlawfully bypass paywalls or other technical barriers.
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Publishers could also claim infringement when chatbots reproduce recognisable elements of an article’s protected expression.
However, copyright law does not protect the basic facts that news articles report. Instead, it protects the specific way publishers express and present those facts.
Szpunar also addressed how companies use copyrighted material to train large language models.
He said the European Union’s text and data mining exception permits such use.
This distinction separates AI training from the reproduction of protected content in individual chatbot answers.
The opinion therefore examines two different activities: training AI models with published material and reproducing protected expression when chatbots generate responses.
The Advocate General’s opinion does not bind the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
However, the court’s judges often follow such opinions when they issue final rulings.
The case could clarify how European copyright law applies when AI chatbots retrieve, reproduce and summarise online news content.
For publishers, the final decision could influence how they protect their work and seek compensation when AI services reuse protected material.
