Gemini’s reuse of news may breach copyright, EU court adviser says

Google’s Gemini chatbot may infringe publishers’ copyright when it retrieves news stories and reuses them in answers under certain circumstances, according to Maciej Szpunar, an advocate general advising the Court of Justice of the European Union. The case was brought by Hungarian website operator Like Company.

Szpunar said publishers’ reproduction rights may be infringed when a chatbot unlawfully bypasses paywalls or other technical barriers to access publications, or reuses their wording in a recognisable manner. Copyright protects the specific form of expression in a news story, rather than the facts it reports, he said.

He distinguished those uses from training large language models, saying the use of copyright-protected material for training is freely permitted under the text and data mining exception. His opinion is not binding, although the court’s judges usually follow advocates general’s advice.

A ruling requiring Google to pay for publishers’ content could provide financial support to online media facing declining traffic as AI-generated summaries increasingly replace traditional search results containing hyperlinks.