Chatbot answers built on news content may clash with European press rights, Advocate General finds in Google case

Advocate General Maciej Szpunar of the Court of Justice of the European Union gave his opinion on Tuesday in the first European case on generative AI and copyright. Hungarian news company Like Company took Google to court because Gemini produced summaries of its articles in response to user questions, Dataconomy reports. A court in Budapest referred the case to the European court in April 2025.

According to Reuters, Szpunar considers that training language models on protected articles is freely permitted under the European exception for text and data mining. When a chatbot retrieves a press article and uses it to build an answer, however, the publisher's right may be infringed, for example if the content is reached by circumventing a paywall or another technical barrier, or if the wording of the article is reused in a recognisable way. The facts themselves are not protected, only the form in which they are written. Szpunar saw no evidence that Google used Like Company's articles to train Gemini.

Google told Reuters that the opinion recognises that training on public information is allowed, and said Gemini does not copy content but writes its own answers. The European Publishers Council wants a clear distinction between permission for search indexing and AI answers that replace the original reporting. The opinion is not binding, although the court usually follows its advisers. A ruling is expected in the coming months.