Melike Pala
03 November 2026•Update: 03 November 2026
Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini may violate press publishers' copyright-related rights by retrieving and reusing online news articles to generate responses, an adviser to the EU's top court said Tuesday.
In an opinion delivered to the Court of Justice of the EU, First Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said AI chatbots could infringe publishers' rights under certain circumstances.
The opinion concerns a case brought by Hungarian media company Like Company against Google Ireland over Gemini's use of articles published on the company's news portals.
Like Company alleged that Google used its articles to train Gemini's large language models and repeatedly reproduced their content and made it available to the public through the chatbot.
The Budapest Regional Court referred the case to the EU court, seeking clarification on whether using press articles to train AI models and reproducing their content in chatbot responses violated publishers' rights under EU law.
- Chatbot responses may infringe copyright
Szpunar said publishers' rights could be infringed when an AI system retrieves an online article and reuses its content to generate an answer.
He said the assessment should depend on whether the chatbot accessed the publication unlawfully, particularly by bypassing technical restrictions such as paywalls, and whether its response reproduced the article's distinctive expression rather than merely reporting facts.
Szpunar said infringement could occur when a chatbot reproduces an original article's expression in a recognizable form, making it unnecessary for users to access the original publication.
He added that publishers' rights to make their content available to the public could also be infringed when such reproduction occurs systematically in responses to related user queries.
The advocate general further said chatbot providers could face liability when such practices are inherent in their business models or when they fail to implement appropriate measures to prevent them effectively.
