EU Court Adviser: Gemini's Answers Could Breach Publisher Copyright

A top adviser to Europe's highest court just handed press publishers a possible weapon against Google's Gemini. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said in a non-binding opinion delivered November 3, 2026, that the chatbot may infringe publisher rights under EU copyright law when it pulls an article off a publisher's site, reuses it to build an answer, and serves that answer to a user.

The case, C-250/25, was referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union in April 2025 and pits Hungarian publisher Like Company against Google Ireland Ltd. The publisher claims Gemini reproduced and communicated substantial chunks of its protected articles without permission between June 2023 and February 2024. An oral hearing followed on March 10, 2026, with Szpunar's opinion arriving roughly eight months later.

His sharpest move is splitting an AI system's life into two acts. Training — when a large language model swallows huge volumes of text to learn patterns — gets cover from the EU's text-and-data-mining exception. Inference — the moment the model actually answers someone — is where things get dicey. If the output reproduces protected expression, the publisher's rights can be violated, per the opinion.

Szpunar also drew a line around what copyright actually guards. The raw facts inside a news story are fair game, he said. Only the specific way a publication expresses those facts gets protection. The legal hook is Article 15 of the EU's Digital Single Market Directive, which grants press publishers their own rights over online uses of their work.

It's not binding, and the court's judges aren't obliged to follow the adviser's reasoning — they'll issue their own ruling. Still, this is the first preliminary reference to squarely tackle AI outputs and press publisher rights. The takeaway for AI developers cuts both ways: training looks safer under this reading, but the risk doesn't vanish. It relocates, from what a model learned to what it says when prodded.

Because it's the first case of its kind, whatever the judges decide will likely become the template for how similar fights across the EU are argued.