EU Court Advocate General: AI Chatbots May Infringe Copyright by Retrieving News Articles

According to reports from German tech media heise online and Austrian ORF, Maciej Szpunar, Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), issued a legal opinion on November 3, 2026, stating that AI chatbots like Google's Gemini may infringe on publishers' reproduction and public communication rights when they retrieve and use news articles from websites to provide answers to users.

The opinion was delivered in a case where Like Company, a Hungarian news publisher operating several portals, sued Google. The publisher alleged that Gemini had reproduced and made publicly available its protected texts without authorization. As the case involves interpretation of EU law, the Budapest court referred questions to the CJEU in Luxembourg. Szpunar emphasized that his opinion is not binding on the judges, with the final judgment expected later; previous indications suggested a ruling would likely not come before 2027.

The Advocate General proposed two key criteria for determining infringement. First, it depends on whether the chatbot accessed the article unlawfully, for example by bypassing technical measures such as paywalls. Second, Szpunar noted that press publishers' rights protect not the reported facts themselves, but the "specific expression form" of the publications. This means copyright law should not grant publishers a monopoly on news facts.

The opinion further clarified that the crucial factor is whether the answer reuses this expression form in a recognizable way such that readers no longer have reason to consult the original text. If the expression form is "systematically recognizable" in the answers, the right of public communication is generally considered infringed.