EU adviser outlines when Gemini press reuse may infringe publishers’ rights

Szpunar’s opinion addresses whether a chatbot’s retrieval and reuse of online press publications to answer queries can infringe publishers’ rights.[1] The Court’s account says Gemini often retrieves or scrapes online press articles in response to news-related queries.[1] The assessment is not simply whether a chatbot answer contains information also found in an article: publishers’ rights protect the article’s specific expression, not the reported facts or news itself.[1] The opinion says infringement may be relevant where the article’s expression is systematically recognizable in answers.[1]

The opinion identifies how the chatbot obtained an article as one relevant consideration, including whether it accessed the publication unlawfully by bypassing effective technical measures such as a paywall.[1] It also asks whether reading the answer entirely dispenses the user from accessing the original publication.[1] The right to make a publication available to the public is generally infringed where its expression is systematically recognizable in chatbot answers.[1] Szpunar said the uses may also be relevant when they are inherent in the provider’s business model or when the provider has failed to take credible and effective countermeasures.[1]

The case is Case C-250/25, brought by Hungarian web-portal operator Like Company against Google in the Budapest Regional Court.[1] Like Company’s articles were repeatedly reproduced and made available through Gemini between June 13, 2023, and May 31, 2024.[1] The Hungarian court referred four preliminary questions to the Court of Justice.[1] Questions about whether the articles trained Gemini were hypothetical, according to the Court’s account, because there was no evidence of such training and LLM training was not an online use of press publications.[1]

The Advocate General’s opinion is not binding on the Court of Justice.[1] The Court’s judges began deliberating after the opinion, and a judgment is due later.[1] The Court of Justice and the General Court do not decide the national dispute itself.[1] The case is the first generative-AI case to reach the Court of Justice.[1] The opinion concerns the publishers’ right in Article 15(1) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, which Szpunar said is intended to protect investment in producing press publications rather than give publishers a monopoly over news.[1]