Key facts
- Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said Gemini's reuse of press publications may infringe publishers' rights in certain circumstances.
- Szpunar said copyright rules protect only the specific form of expression, not the mere facts reported.
- Szpunar said use of copyright-protected material to train large language models is freely permitted under the text and data mining exception.
- Szpunar was advising the court in a case brought by Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google.
An adviser to Europe's highest court said on Tuesday that the use of press publications by Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini may in certain circumstances infringe copyright rules.
"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," Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said.
Szpunar was advising the court in a case brought by Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google. Opinions of the advocate-general are usually followed by the court's judges.