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An adviser to the European Union’s top court said Tuesday that Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini may be breaking copyright rules in certain cases when it uses press publications.
Using material for training an AI model is “freely permitted under the text and data mining exception,” Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, an adviser to the court who issues a legal opinion before judges rule, said.
But he noted there was “no evidence that Like Company’s articles” had been used to train Gemini.
It is the first generative AI case, involving systems that create text and other content, to reach the European Court of Justice, after Hungarian press publisher Like Company took Google to court over the use of articles from its online news portals.
Szpunar recommended the court focus in its ruling on the Gemini chatbot’s answers.
“When an LLM-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a press publisher’s website, reuses that publication to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, the press publisher’s right may be infringed in certain circumstances,” the adviser said, referring to large language models, the systems that power chatbots.
He said the publisher’s right does not protect “mere facts” reported but “only the specific form of expression.”
A judgment is expected in around six months. A Google spokesperson said, “Gemini learns linguistic patterns to create original outputs rather than replicating content, supported by extensive publisher controls that give rightsholders clear choice and the ability to opt out.”
The spokesperson also welcomed “the advocate general’s opinion recognizing that EU law permits AI training on publicly available information”.
The opinion is not binding on the court, but it will be influential and widely considered a sign of the direction the case is taking.
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