EU Court Adviser Says Google Gemini May Infringe Press Publishers' Rights in Some Cases

Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the Court of Justice of the European Union on November 3, 2026 that AI chatbots such as Google Gemini may, in certain circumstances, infringe press publishers' rights when they retrieve news articles in real time and reuse them to answer users. His opinion in Case C-250/25, brought by the Hungarian publisher Like Company against Google Ireland, is not binding, and the Court will give its judgment at a later date, according to the Court's press release.

The Court describes it as the first generative AI case to reach it, in a growing set of AI copyright disputes between publishers and AI companies. An Advocate General is an independent legal adviser who proposes a solution before the judges deliberate, and the Court usually follows those opinions (Reuters via RTÉ). The opinion arrives a day after The New York Times sued Brave over search results sold to AI companies, another case that centers on what happens at answer time rather than during training.

What did the Advocate General say about chatbot answers?

Szpunar said on November 3, 2026 that when a chatbot driven by a large language model retrieves an article from a press publisher's website, reuses it to generate an answer and gives that answer to a user, the publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances. Whether the reproduction right applies depends on two factors, according to the Court's press release:

• Unlawful access. Did the chatbot reach the article unlawfully, in particular by getting around effective technical measures such as a paywall or protections against web scraping?
• Recognizable expression. Does the answer merely report facts from the article, or does it reuse the article's form of expression so recognizably that the user is entirely dispensed from reading the original?

The separate right of making the content available to the public is, as a rule, infringed when an article's expression is "systematically recognisable" in the chatbot's answers to related queries, the press release says. The provider of the chatbot is liable where such uses are inherent to its business model, or where it has not put in place appropriate measures to counter them credibly and effectively.

Szpunar stressed that the press publisher's right protects the specific form of expression of an article and the investment behind it, not the facts it reports, and does not give publishers a monopoly over the news itself. The press release describes Gemini as using retrieval augmented generation, also called grounding: the model collects information from the web in real time to make its answers more accurate, which often means scraping press articles.

What about training AI models on news articles?

Szpunar advised the Court to declare inadmissible the two questions about training, because there is no evidence that Like Company's articles were used to train the Gemini models and because training a model is not an "online use" of press publications, according to the press release. For the sake of completeness, he suggested that using protected works to train a large language model is, as a rule, freely permitted under the EU text and data mining exception, the rule in Article 4 of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive that allows automated analysis of text and data.

How did the case reach the Court of Justice?

Like Company, which operates several Hungarian web portals, sued Google Ireland before a Budapest court, claiming that Google repeatedly reproduced its articles and made them available through the Gemini chatbot between June 13, 2023 and May 31, 2024, the press release says. The Budapest court stayed the case and sent four questions to Luxembourg on April 3, 2025, and the Court heard the parties on March 10, 2026, according to Digital Policy Alert.

Like Company had agreed to have its content shown in Google Search but not in the chatbot, the law firm Covington wrote on its Inside Global Tech blog in June 2025. The publisher says its traffic has fallen as AI generated summaries replace search results that link to its sites, and a ruling against Google could require it to pay fees for such content (Reuters via RTÉ).

How did Google and publishers respond?

A Google spokesperson told Reuters on November 3, 2026 that the EU's text and data mining exceptions are "vital for Europe's competitiveness and AI development," and that Gemini "learns linguistic patterns to create original outputs rather than replicating content" (via RTÉ). The company also pointed to controls that let publishers opt out.

Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, said it is important to tell apart allowing a site to be indexed for search and authorizing AI answers that substitute for the original reporting, and that publishers should not have to choose between search visibility and protecting their rights (Reuters via WTAQ).

Google's own documentation shows where that choice sits today. In an October 2026 Search Central post, Google says Google-Extended, the AI training control it has offered since 2023, also governs grounding: "Websites that specifically allow Google-Extended are eligible to appear in responses and receive clicks via grounding in Gemini Apps." The opinion makes a chatbot provider liable when it has not put appropriate measures in place, but the press release does not say whether an opt out control of this kind would count as one.

What we don't know yet

• When the Court of Justice will rule; Reuters reports only that a judgment is expected in the coming months.
• Whether the judges will follow the opinion in full, in part or not at all.
• How the Budapest court will apply the two factors to Gemini's actual answers about Like Company's articles, since the Court of Justice interprets EU law but does not decide the dispute.
• Whether opt out controls such as Google-Extended would count as "appropriate measures" under the liability test.