EU court adviser says AI chatbot answers reusing press articles may infringe publishers' rights in some cases

What happened

On 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his opinion in Case C-250/25 (Like Company) at the Court of Justice of the European Union, the first generative AI case to reach the Court. Like Company, a Hungarian operator of web portals, sued Google Ireland before the Budapest Regional Court, arguing that Google used its articles to train the Gemini language models and repeatedly reproduced and made them available through the Gemini chatbot between 13 June 2023 and 31 May 2024.

What the Advocate General advised

Szpunar advised the Court to declare inadmissible the two questions concerning LLM training, on the grounds that there is no evidence Like Company's articles were used to train the Gemini models and that training a model is not an 'online use' of press publications. For the sake of completeness, he suggested that using works protected by copyright to train an LLM is, as a rule, freely permitted under the EU text and data mining exception.

On the chatbot's answers, he advised that when an LLM-driven chatbot retrieves a press publication, reuses it to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, the press publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances. Whether the reproduction right is engaged depends on two factors: whether the chatbot accessed the publication unlawfully, in particular by circumventing effective technical measures such as a paywall or anti-scraping measures; and whether the answer merely reports facts or reuses the publication's form of expression in a recognisable manner, to such an extent that the user is entirely dispensed from accessing the original. The press publisher's right protects the specific form of expression, not the mere facts reported.

Status

An Advocate General's opinion is not binding on the Court of Justice. The judges are now deliberating, and judgment will be given at a later date. This item reports the opinion and the Court's press release, not a ruling.