Google’s Gemini chatbot can break European copyright rules when it draws on press stories to answer users, an adviser to the European Union’s highest court has said, in an opinion that could reshape how AI companies handle news content.
Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, advising the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg, said a chatbot that retrieves a publication from a press publisher’s website, reuses it to generate an answer and delivers that answer to the user may infringe the publisher’s right in certain circumstances.
The case was brought by Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google over its Gemini chatbot. A ruling against Google could force the company to pay fees for using publishers’ content, offering a potential lifeline to online media outlets that have seen traffic fall as AI-generated summaries increasingly replace search results that link back to their sites.
Szpunar drew a careful line between facts and expression. Copyright rules do not protect the mere facts reported by press publications, he said, only their specific form of expression. Gemini’s answers would fall under publishers’ reproduction right, he argued, when a chatbot reaches publications by unlawfully circumventing paywalls or other technical barriers, or when it reuses the form of expression of a publication in a recognisable manner.
At the same time, the advocate general gave AI developers an important allowance. The use of copyright-protected material to train large language models — systems that use vast amounts of text to generate human-like responses and summarise information — is freely permitted under the text and data mining exception, he said.
That distinction matters for the wider AI industry. It suggests the legal risk lies less in how models are built than in how chatbots present other people’s work to users in real time, particularly when answers reproduce recognisable passages or bypass the paywalls that fund journalism.
Opinions of the advocate general are not binding on the court, but they are usually followed by its judges. A final ruling will therefore be watched closely by publishers, search engines and chatbot makers across Europe, all of whom are grappling with how copyright law applies to a technology that answers questions by synthesising material it has read.
For publishers, the stakes are existential as well as legal. If courts require chatbots to respect publishers’ rights when they reuse stories, news outlets could gain leverage to negotiate payment. If not, they fear, the summaries that keep users from clicking through will continue to erode the advertising and subscription revenue on which much of their reporting depends.
Sources: Reuters, “Google AI chatbot’s use of press items may infringe copyright rules, EU court adviser says” (3 November 2026), https://live.euronext.com/en/financial-news/googles-use-press-ai-chatbot-may-infringe-copyright-rules-eu-court-adviser-says
