An adviser to Europe's highest court said on November 3 that Google's Gemini chatbot may breach publishers' copyright when it retrieves their articles and reuses them to generate answers, Reuters reported. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar's opinion in the case brought by Hungarian news operator Like Company draws a line: a publisher's reproduction right may be infringed when a chatbot gets around a paywall or other technical barrier, or reuses 'the form of expression of that publication in a recognisable manner.' The mere facts in a story are not protected — only their specific expression.

The same opinion cuts the other way on training: using copyrighted material to train large language models is 'freely permitted under the text and data mining exception,' Szpunar said, and there was no evidence Google had used Like Company's articles to train Gemini. The disputed activity covers June 2023 to May 2024. Google welcomed the training point and said Gemini 'learns linguistic patterns to create original outputs,' with publisher opt-out controls; the European Publishers Council argued publishers should not have to choose between search visibility and protecting their rights.

An advocate general's opinion is advisory, not a judgment — but the Court of Justice follows the majority of them, and it will rule in the coming months. A ruling against Google could force it to pay fees for content reused in AI answers, at a moment when publishers say AI summaries are replacing the search traffic they used to receive.