EU court adviser says Google Gemini's reuse of news articles may infringe press publishers' rights

An adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union said on Tuesday, November 3, that Google's Gemini chatbot may infringe the rights of press publishers when it retrieves and reuses their articles in real time to answer user queries. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his opinion in Case C-250/25, Like Company, the first generative AI case to reach the Luxembourg court.

The dispute

Like Company, a Hungarian operator of several news portals, sued Google before the Budapest Regional Court. It claims that Google used its articles to train the Gemini models and repeatedly reproduced them and made them available to the public through the chatbot between June 13, 2023 and May 31, 2024. The Hungarian court paused the case and referred four questions on the interpretation of EU law to the Court of Justice.

What the Advocate General said

According to the court's press release, Szpunar advised the judges to declare inadmissible the two questions about model training, because there is no evidence that Like Company's articles were used to train Gemini and because training is not an "online use" of press publications. For completeness, he added that using copyright-protected material to train a large language model is, as a rule, freely permitted under the EU's text and data mining exception.

On the chatbot's answers, he said that when an LLM-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a publisher's website, reuses it to generate an answer and provides that answer to the user, the publisher's right "may be infringed in certain circumstances." Two factors matter: whether the chatbot accessed the article unlawfully, for example by circumventing a paywall or other technical measures, and whether the answer merely reports facts or reuses the article's form of expression so recognisably that the user no longer needs to visit the original. The publisher's right protects the specific expression of a publication, not "the mere facts," he stressed.

Szpunar also said a chatbot provider is liable where such uses are inherent to its business model or where it has failed to put in place credible and effective measures to counter them.

Reactions and next steps

Reuters reported that Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, said it was important to distinguish between allowing search indexing and authorising AI answers that substitute for original reporting. A Google spokesperson, quoted by RTÉ, said Europe's text and data mining exceptions are "vital for Europe's competitiveness and AI development" and that Gemini creates original outputs rather than replicating content, backed by controls that let rightsholders opt out.

Advocate General opinions are not binding, but the court follows them in most cases. A judgment is expected in the coming months and could determine whether Google has to pay publishers for such uses of their content.

Sources: CJEU press release, Reuters, RTÉ