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TL;DR
On Nov. 3, 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the EU Court of Justice that chatbots using online news articles may infringe publishers’ rights if they bypass access restrictions or reproduce recognisable expression. He said the test does not appear to be met in the Gemini case before the court; the opinion is not binding, and the court has not set a judgment date.
Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the European Union’s Court of Justice on Nov. 3 that a chatbot using online news articles in answers may infringe press publishers’ rights in certain circumstances. In Case C‑250/25, Like Company v Google Ireland, he said the key issues are whether the service obtained an article by bypassing access restrictions or reproduced its recognisable expression—not simply whether it reported the same facts. His opinion is not binding, and he said the test does not appear to be met by the example at the centre of the case.
The dispute began after Like Company, which operates Hungarian news portals, sued Google in Hungary. The publisher alleges that Google used its articles to train Gemini and repeatedly reproduced or made them available through the chatbot between June 13, 2023, and May 31, 2024. Those are claims in the case, not findings by the Court of Justice.
The example discussed in the opinion involved a Hungarian article about a singer’s reported proposal to bring dolphins to Lake Balaton. A user asked Gemini to summarise the article, and the chatbot returned a summary in Hungarian. Szpunar considered whether this kind of answer could infringe the EU press publishers’ right, established under the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive.
Under his proposed test, a chatbot could infringe if it accessed an article unlawfully—for example, by circumventing a paywall or anti-scraping measure—or if its answer reproduced the article’s form of expression so recognisably that a user could do without visiting the original. The opinion says that merely communicating the same facts is insufficient. Szpunar said the apparent absence of access barriers and recognisable wording in the example, along with safeguards that Google appears to use, meant the conditions did not appear to be met. The Hungarian court must decide the 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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What the Opinion Means for Chatbots
For businesses that operate chatbots, AI search products or other services that retrieve material from the web, the opinion points to practical risks around how content is accessed and how much of its wording appears in an answer. A system that respects website restrictions and generates a fresh summary may be treated differently under this proposed approach from one that circumvents a barrier or returns a close substitute for a publisher’s work.
For publishers, the opinion could support claims over particular forms of chatbot use and give them leverage in discussions about access and licensing. It does not, however, establish a general right to control every use of news facts or every AI-generated summary. The distinction Szpunar draws is between free-to-report information and protected expression, subject to the conditions he describes.
Users and product teams may also see more emphasis on links, source attribution and summaries that do not substitute for the original article. Those are possible business responses, not requirements established by a final court ruling. The outcome could affect how companies design retrieval systems and manage publisher relationships, but the legal position remains unsettled until the Court of Justice rules.
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How the Gemini Dispute Reached Luxembourg
Like Company brought its claim before a Hungarian court, which referred four questions to the Court of Justice in Luxembourg: two about AI training and two about chatbot answers. The hearing took place on March 10, 2026, after written observations from nine EU governments and the European Commission. The Court’s press office described the case as the first generative AI case to reach it.
The publisher’s right under Article 15(1) of the 2019 directive was introduced in part to let press publishers control and license some online uses of their publications, including uses by news aggregators. The case asks how that right applies to chatbot answers, a different kind of service from the aggregators the law originally addressed.
On training, Szpunar’s main response was procedural: he advised the Court to treat the two questions as inadmissible because the record did not establish that Like Company’s articles had been used to train Gemini. The article at issue appeared in July 2023, while Gemini 1.0 was released in December 2023. He considered it more plausible that Gemini retrieved the page live when answering the user, a method known as retrieval-augmented generation, than that the article had been part of the model’s training data.
Only as an additional discussion, Szpunar said AI training is in principle covered by the EU’s text and data mining exception, subject to rights holders’ ability to opt out in a machine-readable way. This was not the operative answer to the training questions, which he recommended the Court dismiss as inadmissible.
““the first generative AI case to reach the Court of Justice””
— Court of Justice of the European Union, press release No 155/26
The Final Copyright Test Is Pending
The Advocate General’s opinion is advisory, not a judgment. The Court of Justice may follow it, modify its reasoning or reach a different conclusion. No date for the final ruling has been announced, and the Hungarian court will still have to apply the EU court’s eventual interpretation to the evidence in the case.
Several questions also remain unresolved. The source material does not establish whether Like Company’s articles were used in training, whether every alleged chatbot answer reproduced protected wording, or what specific safeguards Google used in the relevant period. Szpunar’s discussion of text and data mining was additional to his recommendation that the training questions be ruled inadmissible; it is not a final Court ruling that all AI training is permitted. The scope of the opinion’s proposed approach across different chatbot designs and national cases is also not settled.
Court Judgment and Hungarian Proceedings
The Court of Justice will issue the next major ruling in the EU case, but it has not announced a timetable. The court’s 2025 statistics put the average duration of preliminary-reference proceedings at 16.9 months; that historical average does not establish when this case will be decided.
After the EU court answers the legal questions, the Hungarian court is expected to resolve the underlying dispute by applying that guidance to the facts and claims before it. Businesses and publishers will then have a clearer indication of how the press publishers’ right applies to chatbot answers, while questions the ruling does not address may continue to be tested in later cases.
Key Questions
Has the EU Court of Justice ruled that Gemini infringed copyright?
No. Advocate General Szpunar issued a nonbinding opinion. He said the proposed infringement conditions did not appear to be met in the example discussed, and the Hungarian court will decide the dispute after the Court of Justice provides its ruling.
When could a chatbot’s answer infringe press publishers’ rights under the opinion?
Szpunar proposed that infringement may arise if a chatbot gets an article by bypassing access restrictions or reproduces its expression so recognisably that users can do without the original. Reporting the same facts alone would not be enough under his test.
Did the opinion decide whether AI companies can train on news articles?
It did not decide that question for this case. Szpunar advised the Court to treat the training questions as inadmissible because the evidence did not establish that Like Company’s articles were used for training. His additional comments on the text and data mining exception were not a final judgment.
What should businesses using web-connected chatbots take from the opinion?
The opinion signals that access methods and close reproduction may matter under EU press publishers’ rights. It is not a final ruling or legal advice; the applicable obligations will depend on the Court of Justice’s judgment and how national courts apply it.
Source: ThorstenMeyerAI.com
