EU court adviser says AI training is generally lawful under the text-and-data-mining exception — if developers avoid pirate sources, respect opt-outs and curb memorisation

What happened

On November 3, 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his opinion in Case C-250/25, Like Company v Google Ireland Limited, the first generative-AI copyright case to reach the Court of Justice of the European Union. Hungarian publisher Like Company Kft. claims Google's Bard and then Gemini chatbots infringed its press publishers' rights between June 13, 2023 and May 31, 2024 by using its articles without authorisation.

Szpunar advises the Court to declare the two referred questions about model training inadmissible, because nothing in the record shows the Hungarian articles were used to train Gemini and because the press publishers' right does not reach training. He then answers them anyway, "for the sake of completeness", across some 95 of the opinion's 239 points.

The provisional training framework

• Training copies are reproductions under EU law, but the text-and-data-mining exception in Article 4 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive "in principle" applies, so training is "as a rule, freely permitted" in the EU.
• Three conditions attach: developers must avoid pirate sources, respect paywalls, bot blocks and machine-readable opt-outs, and show they took steps to stop the model reproducing specific works.
• A trained model is not itself a database of copies, but verbatim regurgitation ("overfitting") can infringe case by case, and the lawfulness of training will depend on anti-memorisation measures.
• On territory, Szpunar leans toward EU law reaching scraping from servers in the Union even when training happens abroad, and notes the AI Act requires general-purpose-model providers to respect EU copyright and opt-outs regardless of where training takes place.

Status

The opinion is not binding. The Court has yet to rule and may not decide the training questions at all in this case. The same referral family includes Mobilguru's pending case C-829/26, already covered as a separate item.