EU Court Adviser Indicates Google’s Gemini May Violate Publisher Copyright

Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, an adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has opined that Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, may infringe the copyright rights of press publishers under EU law. This opinion, delivered on November 3, 2026, is non-binding but represents a pivotal moment in the intersection of AI technology and copyright issues.

The case, identified as C-250/25, involves the Hungarian press publisher Like Company, which claims that Gemini reproduced substantial portions of its protected articles without authorization between June 2023 and February 2024. Szpunar emphasized the legal nuances surrounding AI outputs, particularly when a chatbot retrieves and reuses content from publisher websites to generate responses.

Szpunar clarified that while the underlying facts of news stories are not protected by copyright, the unique expression of those facts is. His opinion distinguishes between two critical phases in an AI's operation: training and inference. During training, the use of copyrighted material is generally covered by the EU's text-and-data-mining (TDM) exception. However, during inference, if the AI's output reproduces protected expressions, it could infringe on the publisher's rights.

This case, referred to the CJEU in April 2025, is the first of its kind to directly address the implications of AI outputs on press publisher rights. The court's eventual ruling will likely have significant implications for both AI developers and content publishers across the EU.