An adviser to the European Union's top court said Nov. 3 that Google's Gemini answers could violate press publishers' rights, in a dispute over news content and visits that support advertising revenue.
Advocate General Maciej Szpunar's nonbinding opinion stems from a lawsuit by Hungarian news publisher Like Company against Google Ireland Limited. The publisher's advertising income depends on traffic to its websites, according to a case summary from the Court of Justice of the European Union.
Like Company alleges that Gemini responses reproduced its articles and made them available without permission. Google disputes that the answers copied the publications or made them available to the public.
Under the EU copyright directive, press publishers have rights over certain online uses of their publications. Hyperlinks, individual words and very short extracts fall outside that protection. The distinction matters because those rights cover an article's original expression, rather than the facts it reports.
Szpunar said a pattern of chatbot answers reusing protected writing could implicate a publisher's right to make its work available to the public. For an individual answer, his proposed assessment asks whether it contains so much recognizable original writing that a reader no longer needs the article itself. Conveying the reported facts alone would not suffice.
His analysis also calls for examining how the chatbot accessed an article, including whether it bypassed a paywall or measures restricting automated collection. The opinion proposes questions for courts to consider; it does not decide whether Gemini infringed Like Company's rights.
The Hungarian court's referral raised two questions about AI training. Szpunar recommended dismissing them as hypothetical because the case record contains no evidence that Like Company's articles were used to train Gemini. In an alternative analysis, he said training could fall within the EU's text and data mining exception if the material was lawfully accessible and its rights holder had not expressly reserved that use in an appropriate manner.
EU judges will issue a judgment at a later, unspecified date. The Hungarian court will then decide the lawsuit.
