EU court adviser says Gemini may infringe on news publishers

An adviser to the EU's highest court said on Tuesday that Google's Gemini chatbot could violate European copyright rules when it uses news articles to generate answers, Reuters reported. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar issued the opinion in a lawsuit filed by Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google.

Szpunar said in a court statement that when an LLM-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a press publisher's website, reuses it to generate an answer, and provides that answer to a user, the publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances. He said infringement could occur when chatbots bypass paywalls or other technical restrictions, or reproduce an article's wording and expression in recognizable form, but that copyright protection does not extend to the facts a report contains, only to how those facts are expressed.

Szpunar also said that using copyrighted material to train large language models is generally permitted under the EU's text and data mining exception. Reuters reported the case could have major implications for online news publishers as AI-generated summaries increasingly replace traditional search results, and that a ruling against Google could strengthen publishers' ability to demand payment when AI chatbots reproduce protected content.