{"slug": "googles-gemini-chatbot-may-breach-eu-copyright-laws", "title": "Google’s Gemini chatbot may breach EU copyright laws", "summary": "Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the Court of Justice of the European Union on November 3 that Google's Gemini chatbot may infringe EU copyright law when it reuses journalistic articles to generate answers, though training large language models on protected publications is generally permitted under the 2019 Digital Single Market Copyright Directive's text-and-data-mining exception. The opinion, the first major legal test for generative AI before the CJEU, stems from a Hungarian case in which website operator Like Company alleged Google Ireland scraped its articles without consent to train Gemini, then called Bard, and reproduced its reporting between June 13, 2023 and May 31, 2024, centering on a July 21, 2023 article about Hungarian singer Kozsó's plan to bring freshwater dolphins to a Lake Balaton aquarium. Szpunar said infringement occurs when a chatbot's answer mirrors original journalism \"to such an extent that the user, by reading that answer, is entirely dispensed from accessing the original publication,\" and rejected Google's argument that freely accessible articles were implicitly licensed for reuse by chatbots; the opinion is non-binding.", "body_md": "Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini may infringe European copyright law when it reuses journalistic articles to generate answers for users, an adviser to the European Union’s highest court concluded on November 3.\n\nIn a landmark [opinion](https://curia.europa.eu/site/jcms/3317819_EmbedVideo/en/opinion-of-the-advocate-general-at-the-court-maciej-szpunar-in-case-c-250/25-like-company) setting out the first major legal test for generative AI before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), Advocate General Maciej Szpunar argued that while tech giants can, as a rule, freely use protected publications to train large language models (LLMs), serving AI-generated summaries that mimic original journalistic reporting risks breaching press publishers’ neighbouring rights.\n\n“When an LLM-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,” the court said in its summary of the opinion.\n\nThe advisory opinion stems from a case brought before Hungarian courts by website operator Like Company against Google Ireland, part of the Alphabet group.\n\nThe Budapest Regional Court stayed the proceedings in 2025 and referred four questions to the Luxembourg judges.\n\nThe publisher alleged that its journalistic articles were scraped without consent to train Gemini, called Bard until February 2024, and that the chatbot subsequently reproduced and repurposed its reporting between June 13, 2023 and May 31, 2024.\n\nThe dispute centres on a July 21, 2023 article on balatonkornyeke.hu, one of Like Company’s portals. It reported Hungarian singer Kozsó’s plan to bring freshwater dolphins to an aquarium at Lake Balaton, western Hungary.\n\nSzpunar drew a technical distinction between training an AI model and outputting synthetic responses to web users.\n\nUnder the EU’s 2019 Digital Single Market Copyright Directive, ingesting copyright-protected material to train machine-learning algorithms is generally permitted under the statutory text-and-data-mining (TDM) exception, the advocate general noted.\n\nHe nonetheless proposed that the questions on training be declared inadmissible, since there was no evidence the Hungarian publisher’s articles had been used for that purpose.\n\nOutputting answers derived from news websites, though, triggers an entirely different legal hurdle.\n\nWhile copyright protections do not cover underlying factual information, Szpunar explained that publishers’ exclusive reproduction and communication rights are, as a rule, infringed if an AI chatbot systematically reproduces the “form of expression” of an article in a recognisable manner.\n\nThe senior legal adviser warned that infringement occurs when a chatbot’s answer mirrors original journalism “to such an extent that the user, by reading that answer, is entirely dispensed from accessing the original publication.”\n\nAnother factor, according to the opinion, is whether the chatbot accessed the article unlawfully, for instance by getting round a paywall or measures that block web scraping.\n\nThe chatbot provider would be liable where such use was inherent to its business model, or where it had failed to take appropriate measures to counter it, Szpunar added.\n\nGoogle had argued that freely accessible articles were implicitly licensed for reuse by chatbots, a position the advocate general rejected.\n\nThe European Commission, which intervened in the case, urged judges to separate how AI models are trained from what they produce.\n\nThe opinion lands amid transatlantic lobbying by media companies, who accuse search engine operators and AI developers of cannibalising digital journalism by synthesising news into conversational widgets without paying licensing fees or directing referral traffic to publishers.\n\nWhile opinions from advocates general are non-binding recommendations, the Luxembourg-based court follows their legal reasoning in the vast majority of final judgments.\n\n[#AG](https://x.com/hashtag/AG?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Szpunar: Opinion in Case C-250/25 on whether a chatbot’s retrieval and reuse of a press publication to generate an answer for a user constitutes “reproduction” and “communication to the public” under [#EUlaw](https://x.com/hashtag/EUlaw?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw).[#CJEU](https://x.com/hashtag/CJEU?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [#AI](https://x.com/hashtag/AI?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [#Gemini](https://x.com/hashtag/Gemini?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) [pic.twitter.com/6VStGlB7yY](https://t.co/6VStGlB7yY)\n\n— EU Court of Justice (@EUCourtPress) [November 3, 2026](https://x.com/EUCourtPress/status/2117547196136460731?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/googles-gemini-chatbot-may-breach-eu-copyright-laws", "canonical_source": "https://brusselssignal.eu/2026/11/googles-gemini-chatbot-may-breach-eu-copyright-laws/", "published_at": "2026-11-04 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-04 08:49:57.053540+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Google", "Gemini", "Maciej Szpunar", "Court of Justice of the European Union", "Like Company", "Google Ireland", "Alphabet", "European Commission"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/googles-gemini-chatbot-may-breach-eu-copyright-laws", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/googles-gemini-chatbot-may-breach-eu-copyright-laws.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/googles-gemini-chatbot-may-breach-eu-copyright-laws.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/googles-gemini-chatbot-may-breach-eu-copyright-laws.jsonld"}}