EU court adviser: Google's Gemini may infringe publishers' rights when it reuses news articles in answers

An adviser to the Court of Justice of the European Union said on 3 November 2026 that Google’s Gemini chatbot may, in certain circumstances, infringe the rights of press publishers when it uses their articles to answer questions, Reuters reported.

The case

The dispute pits the Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said that when an AI chatbot retrieves a publication from a publisher’s site, reuses it to generate an answer and serves that answer to a user, the publisher’s right “may be infringed in certain circumstances”.

• According to the opinion, this applies when a chatbot circumvents paywalls or other technical barriers, or reuses an article’s form of expression in a recognisable way.
• Copyright does not protect “mere facts”, only the specific wording, he said.
• Using copyrighted material to train large language models is, in his view, permitted under the EU text and data mining exception. He found no evidence that Google trained Gemini on Like Company’s articles.

Reactions

A Google spokesperson welcomed the recognition that EU law permits AI training on public information and said Gemini creates original output and offers publishers opt-out controls. The European Publishers Council said search indexing must be distinguished from AI answers that replace original reporting.

What next

The opinion is not binding. The court usually follows its advisers and is expected to rule in the coming months. A ruling against Google could oblige it to pay publishers for such use, according to Reuters.