EU court adviser: Google's Gemini may infringe news copyright rules
A top EU legal adviser says Gemini could breach publishers' rights when it pulls live news into answers, even though training AI on that same news stays legal.
What happened: On November 3 in Brussels, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, an adviser to the EU's top court, issued a formal opinion in a case brought by Hungarian news site operator Like Company against Google. He said that when Gemini fetches an article from a publisher's website and reuses it to compose an answer, that publisher's copyright may be infringed depending on the circumstances. Advocate general opinions aren't binding, but the full court follows them in most cases.
Why it matters: This is one of the first direct legal signals in Europe about whether AI chatbots that quote or summarize live news crash into the same copyright protections publishers already use against search engines. If the court's judges agree, Google and other chatbot makers could face pressure to license or limit answers built on scraped news text, a distinct legal question from the ongoing fights over using news archives to train models in the first place.
How it works, plainly: Szpunar drew a sharp line. Copyright does not cover facts, only the specific wording a publication uses to report them. He also said training large language models on copyrighted text is already allowed under the EU's text-and-data-mining exception, a rule that lets AI firms feed in news archives without extra payment. What he flagged as risky is different: a chatbot retrieving one specific article in real time to answer a question and reproducing its wording, which looks more like direct reuse than training.
What happens next: The case returns to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a final ruling, which could still take time and may not fully match the adviser's opinion. Until then, this is legal guidance, not settled law. The dispute traces back to the EU's 2019 press-publishers' right, the same rule publishers have already used to win snippet-licensing payments from Google News in several European countries.