In brief

• An EU Court of Justice advocate general says AI chatbots reusing press articles in real time may, in some cases, breach publishers' rights.
• The opinion concerns Google Gemini and the Hungarian company Like Company.
• The opinion is advisory; the Court's final ruling has not yet been issued.

Opinion in the Google and Like Company case

Maciej Szpunar, Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union, has issued a non-binding opinion on whether AI chatbots can breach press publishers' rights when they use online news. The dispute concerns Google Gemini and the Hungarian company Like Company (Rzecznik TSUE: chatbot AI może naruszać prawa wydawców prasy – Prawo.pl) (AI może naruszać prawa wydawców. Rzecznik TSUE wskazuje na Google Gemini – Bankier.pl).

Szpunar said that chatbots based on artificial intelligence which collect publicly available press articles and reuse them in real time to generate answers to user questions may, under certain conditions, infringe publishers' rights. The case was framed as a question of where the line falls between using facts from an article and taking protected content (Přebírání článků umělou inteligencí? Advokát soudu EU navrhl chatbotům hranice – Novinky.cz).

What the opinion does and does not decide

The advocate general's view is advisory. The judges of the Court of Justice will make the final ruling, which has not yet been issued. Courts usually follow such opinions, but they are not required to.

The opinion turns on the specific mechanics of how the chatbot uses article text, rather than on the mere fact that AI systems read news. Reporting on the opinion describes the question as whether reuse for generating a direct answer goes beyond what copyright and publishers' rights allow (Prozesse: EuGH-Gutachten: KI-Chatbots können Urheberrecht verletzen – ZEIT ONLINE) (Google’s use of press by AI chatbot may infringe copyright rules, EU court adviser says – Investing.com).

Why it matters for publishers and users

For news organisations, the question is whether AI answer engines can present summaries drawn from their reporting without a licence. For AI developers, the opinion signals that real-time retrieval and reuse may carry legal risk in the EU even where the output is a new text.

The Court's final judgment will set the rule that national courts across the bloc must apply, so the outcome will shape licensing deals and product design for chatbots offered in Europe.