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TL;DR
On November 3, 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the EU Court of Justice that chatbots can infringe press publishers’ rights when they access articles unlawfully or reproduce their distinctive expression so extensively that users can skip the original. He said the test does not appear to be met in the dispute over Google’s Gemini and a Hungarian dolphin story. The opinion is nonbinding; the Hungarian court and ultimately the EU court’s judges will decide the case.
Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the European Union’s top court on November 3 that an AI chatbot may infringe press publishers’ rights if it obtains an article by bypassing access restrictions or reproduces its distinctive wording so closely that users can skip the original. His nonbinding opinion in Case C-250/25 concerns Google’s Gemini and a Hungarian publisher’s complaint, but Szpunar said the conditions for infringement do not appear to be present in the example before him.
The case was referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union by a Hungarian court after Like Company, which operates several Hungarian news websites, sued Google. The publisher alleges that Google used its articles to train Gemini and repeatedly reproduced and made them available through the chatbot between June 13, 2023, and May 31, 2024. Those are allegations in the dispute, not findings established by the opinion.
The dispute centers on a July 2023 article about a singer’s reported plan to bring dolphins to Lake Balaton. A user asked Gemini to summarize the article in Hungarian. Szpunar considered whether answering questions with material retrieved from online news sites can fall under the EU press publishers’ right, adopted in 2019. He said a chatbot’s use may infringe that right in certain circumstances, including when it accesses material by evading a paywall or anti-scraping measure, or when its answer repeats the article’s expressive form to the point that the user can dispense with the original.
Simply conveying the same facts is not enough under the test he proposed. In this specific example, Szpunar said the apparent absence of access barriers and recognizable copied wording, along with safeguards attributed to Google, suggest the conditions are not met. He left application of the law to the Hungarian court. The opinion is advisory, not binding, and the Court of Justice has not announced a date for its judgment.
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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How the Proposed Test Affects AI Services
If the court adopts Szpunar’s approach, companies that build chatbots or AI search tools around live web retrieval would have to pay attention to both how they access publishers’ sites and how much of an article their answers reproduce. Avoiding paywalls and technical blocks would not alone settle every copyright question: an answer that closely tracks an article’s distinctive expression could still face a claim. Businesses may respond by changing retrieval practices, answer length, linking, or licensing arrangements.
For publishers, the opinion points toward a possible enforcement route when a service bypasses restrictions or substitutes for the original article. It does not give publishers ownership over the underlying news facts or establish a general right to charge for every AI-generated account of them. That distinction matters to users, too: answers that summarize several sources and direct readers to original reporting could remain possible, while close reproductions may carry greater legal risk. These are potential effects of the proposed test, not changes already ordered by the court.
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From News Aggregators to Chatbots
The EU’s press publishers’ right comes from the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. The opinion notes that lawmakers adopted it with online services such as news aggregators in mind, allowing publishers to control and license certain uses of press-publication extracts. The present referral asks whether that right also applies when a chatbot retrieves an article and uses it to form a response.
The Hungarian court sent Luxembourg four questions: two concerning alleged use of articles to train Gemini and two about chatbot answers. Nine EU governments and the European Commission submitted written observations, and the court held a hearing on March 10, 2026. The example involved retrieval-augmented generation, a process in which a system searches for relevant web pages and uses retrieved material to generate an answer. The opinion treats that live retrieval issue separately from model training.
“The company alleges that Google repeatedly reproduced its articles and made them available through Gemini.”
— Like Company, according to the Court of Justice press release
What the Judges Still Must Decide
The opinion does not settle the dispute. The Court of Justice’s judges must issue the final interpretation, and the Hungarian court will then apply the law to the evidence. It remains unknown when the EU judgment will be delivered or whether the judges will follow Szpunar’s proposed test.
The training questions are also not resolved on their merits in this opinion. Szpunar considered them inadmissible because, in his view, the record did not support the claim that Like Company’s articles were used to train Gemini. He added, as a separate discussion, that training is generally covered by the EU text-and-data-mining exception, subject to rights holders’ ability to opt out in a machine-readable way. That discussion was not a ruling that Google trained on these articles or that the practice is lawful in every case. The evidence about access methods, safeguards, and the chatbot’s wording will remain relevant to the national proceedings.
Awaiting the EU Court’s Judgment
The next major step is the Court of Justice’s judgment in Case C-250/25; no judgment date has been set. The court reported that preliminary-reference cases took an average of 16.9 months in 2025, but that statistic does not predict when this case will be decided. Once the EU court gives its interpretation, the Hungarian court can continue the case and assess the specific claims and evidence. Until then, the opinion offers guidance rather than a binding outcome for Google, Like Company, or other AI services.
Key Questions
Has the EU court ruled that Gemini infringed copyright?
No. Szpunar issued a nonbinding opinion, not the final judgment. He said the infringement conditions do not appear to be met in the example discussed, and the Hungarian court will decide the dispute after the EU court provides its interpretation.
When could a chatbot’s use of a news article infringe publishers’ rights?
Under the adviser’s proposed test, infringement may arise if a chatbot gets an article by bypassing a paywall or anti-scraping measure, or reproduces its distinctive expression so closely that users can skip the original. Repeating the same facts alone would not meet that test.
Did the opinion decide whether Gemini was trained on Like Company’s articles?
No. Szpunar said the training questions should be treated as inadmissible because the case record did not show that the articles were in Gemini’s training data. His additional discussion of text-and-data mining was not a finding that Google used these particular articles.
What happens next in the case?
The Court of Justice must issue its judgment, with no date announced. The Hungarian court will then apply the EU court’s interpretation to the evidence in Like Company’s case against Google.
Source: ThorstenMeyerAI.com
