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TL;DR
On Nov. 3, 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the EU Court of Justice that chatbots can infringe press publishers’ rights if they obtain articles unlawfully or reproduce their distinctive expression closely enough to substitute for the original. He said the test may not be met in the dispute over Google’s Gemini chatbot, and the opinion is not binding; the Hungarian court must still decide the case.
Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the European Union’s top court on Nov. 3 that AI chatbots may infringe press publishers’ rights when they retrieve and reuse news articles in answers, but only under specific conditions. In a dispute over Google’s Gemini chatbot, he said the available facts do not appear to meet those conditions; his opinion is nonbinding, and the Hungarian court will decide the case.
The case, Like Company v Google Ireland (C‑250/25), began after Hungarian publisher Like Company challenged Gemini’s summary of a news article about a proposal to bring dolphins to Lake Balaton. The publisher argues that Google used its articles to train Gemini and reproduced them in chatbot answers. The EU court’s press release says the alleged uses occurred between June 13, 2023, and May 31, 2024.
Szpunar’s proposed test focuses on two questions: whether a chatbot accessed an article unlawfully, such as by bypassing a paywall or anti-scraping measure, and whether its answer reproduced the article’s distinctive expression so closely that a user could do without reading the original. Merely conveying the same facts, he said, is not enough. In the example before him, he found no apparent access barrier or recognisable wording in the answer, and noted that Google appeared to have safeguards.
On the separate allegation of AI training, Szpunar advised the court to reject the questions as inadmissible because the case materials did not show that Like Company’s articles were used to train Gemini. He also discussed training as a separate matter, saying it is generally covered by the EU text-and-data-mining exception, subject to rights holders’ ability to opt out in a machine-readable form. That discussion is not a ruling on Google’s conduct in this case.
Infographic 01 · Where the line runs
When a chatbot answer infringes a publisher's right
Advocate General Szpunar's test in Case C‑250/25 for chatbots that retrieve news articles in real time and reuse them in their answers.
Stays free
- Reporting the same facts. Nobody owns the news itself (pts 199–200).
- A short factual summary, presented differently (pt 208).
- An overview built from several sources, restructured, with links back (pts 208, 234).
- Individual words or very short extracts (pt 201).
Can infringe
- Getting around a paywall or anti-scraping block to fetch the article (pt 188).
- An answer that keeps the article’s structure and phrasing, even paraphrased, so readers can skip the original (pts 202, 205, 207).
- Systematically recognisable articles in answers to related questions: making available to the public (pts 213, 240).
The test, step by step
For a chatbot that fetches a news article live (RAG) and answers a user
- Is it an online use by a service in the EU?Yes for RAG answers to EU users, wherever the servers are (pts 165–169).
- Did the bot get in lawfully?No circumvention of effective technical measures (pt 188).
- Is the article’s form of expression recognisable in the answer, to the point of substitution?Side-by-side comparison; facts do not count (pts 196–209).
- Is the provider responsible?If inherent to its business model, or no reasonable measures such as respecting blocks and output filters (pts 221–222).
- Temporary copies during retrieval are then exempt under Art. 5(1) InfoSoc; the TDM exception does not apply to RAG (pts 179–189).
An Advocate General’s opinion, not a judgment. General information, not legal advice.
Sources: Opinion of AG Szpunar, C‑250/25 (provisional text), CURIA press release No 155/26 (3 Nov 2026). Point numbers refer to the provisional text.
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Where Chatbot Summaries Cross the Line
The opinion offers a possible legal boundary for services that use live web retrieval to answer questions about news. Under Szpunar’s approach, publishers would not gain control over facts simply because those facts appeared in their reporting. Their rights could apply, however, if a service defeats barriers to access or reproduces the article’s protected expression in a way that substitutes for the publication.
For content creators and publishers, that distinction may shape negotiations over licensing and decisions about access controls. For chatbot operators, it points to risks around how systems retrieve and present material, rather than treating every factual summary as infringement. Users could see answers that draw on multiple sources and link readers to original reporting, though the opinion does not require a particular product design.
These are potential implications of an adviser’s analysis, not settled EU law. The Court of Justice may adopt, modify or reject the proposed approach, and the national court must apply the eventual ruling to the evidence.
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From Gemini Answer to EU Court
Like Company operates several Hungarian news websites and brought its case before a court in Budapest. That court referred four questions to the Court of Justice: two concerning alleged AI training and two concerning chatbot answers. Nine EU member states and the European Commission filed written observations, and the hearing took place on March 10, 2026, according to the opinion.
The dispute concerns Article 15(1) of the EU’s 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, which grants press publishers rights over certain online uses of their publications. The opinion says the provision was adopted with services such as news aggregators in mind. The current case asks how that right applies to generative chatbot responses.
Szpunar’s analysis distinguishes live retrieval from model training. He considered it implausible that the particular article, published in July 2023, had been included in Gemini’s training data, given the timing described in the opinion. He said the answer could instead have been generated after Gemini retrieved the article from the web. That is the account set out in the opinion, not a final judicial finding on every aspect of Google’s system.
The Court Still Has to Rule
Szpunar’s opinion is not binding, and the Court of Justice has not announced when it will issue its judgment. The court may take a different view of the legal test or its application. After that, the Hungarian court will need to decide the dispute using the final interpretation and the evidence before it.
Important factual and legal issues remain unresolved. The opinion says the record did not establish that Like Company’s articles were used in Gemini training; that does not by itself determine what data Google used more broadly. The precise scope of the text-and-data-mining exception, the effect of a rights-holder opt-out in a particular dispute, and how the proposed test would apply to other chatbot products also remain open.
Awaiting the Court’s Judgment
The next major step is a judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union. No date has been set. The court’s 2025 statistics put the average time for preliminary-reference cases at 16.9 months, but that figure is a general average and does not establish when this case will be decided.
Once the EU court rules on the questions referred from Hungary, the Budapest court can continue the underlying case and assess the parties’ claims against that interpretation. Until then, the adviser’s opinion provides guidance about possible legal limits, not a final determination that Google or another chatbot provider infringed publishers’ rights.
Key Questions
Has the EU court ruled that Gemini infringed the publisher’s rights?
No. Advocate General Szpunar issued a nonbinding opinion. He said the conditions for infringement do not appear to be met in the example, but the Court of Justice has not yet ruled.
When could a chatbot answer infringe a publisher’s rights under the opinion?
The proposed test covers cases where a chatbot accesses an article unlawfully, such as by bypassing an access barrier, or reproduces its distinctive expression so closely that readers can dispense with the original. Repeating the same facts alone would not be enough under the opinion.
Did the opinion find that Google trained Gemini on Like Company’s articles?
No. Szpunar advised the court to treat the training questions as inadmissible because the case materials did not show that the articles were used for training. His separate discussion of training was not a finding about Google’s data.
What does the opinion mean for content creators?
It could support publishers’ arguments where a service bypasses access controls or produces near-copies, while leaving facts and ordinary summaries outside that proposed threshold. The final effect depends on the Court of Justice’s judgment and how national courts apply it.
Source: ThorstenMeyerAI.com
