EU court adviser says Google’s Gemini may infringe press copyright

Google’s Gemini chatbot may infringe EU copyright rules when it uses press articles to generate answers, an adviser to the bloc’s highest court said on Tuesday.

The opinion draws a distinction between training AI models on copyrighted material and reproducing publishers’ work in the responses they give users, Reuters reported.

Advocate General Maciej Szpunar found that training large language models on protected articles is permitted under EU law. What happens after training, however, raises a separate copyright question.

Feeding copyrighted material into model training is “freely permitted under the text and data mining exception,” Szpunar wrote.

The position changes when a chatbot retrieves a publisher’s article, uses it to construct an answer and presents that answer to a user.

In such cases, “the press publisher’s right may be infringed in certain circumstances,” he said.

Szpunar also clarified that copyright does not protect the facts reported in news articles, only the way those facts are expressed.

The opinion concerns case C-250/25, the first case before the Court of Justice of the European Union to examine generative AI and copyright.

Hungarian news publisher Like Company sued Google Ireland after Gemini generated summaries of its articles in response to user queries.

The publisher argues that the chatbot reproduced its content without permission, going beyond the use of short extracts. A Budapest court referred the questions to the EU court in April 2025.

Google has argued that Gemini does not memorise articles and that any potentially infringing outputs would fall under exceptions for temporary copies and text and data mining. The company has also challenged the application of Hungarian law, arguing that Gemini was not trained in Hungary.

Advocate General opinions are not binding on the court, although judges follow them in most cases. A final ruling is expected in the coming months. It could clarify how AI chatbots across the EU must respect the press publishers’ right, introduced under the bloc’s 2019 copyright reform.

Publishers and AI companies are already contesting the use of copyrighted material in courtrooms on both sides of the Atlantic, from licensing disputes to lawsuits over web scraping.

The Luxembourg case puts the focus on what chatbots produce for users, rather than on the data used to train them.

I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, (show all) I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, and change. I write about startups, venture capital, digital policy, and Europe ecosystem, with an eye on the larger story beneath them: who gets to build the future, who profits from it, and how Europe is learning to speak in a louder voice of its own. Before moving into senior editorial leadership, I've built my career for over +10 years across journalism, storytelling, content strategy, SEO, and digital publishing, with experience in SaaS, hospitality, art, and culture.

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