EU court advocate general says Gemini answers may infringe publishers' rights

On November 3, 2026, Maciej Szpunar, Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg, presented an opinion in the lawsuit brought by the Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google. The opinion was reported by Reuters. Szpunar suggested that when an LLM-based chatbot such as Gemini retrieves a news article from a publisher's website, uses it to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, it may in certain circumstances infringe the rights of the publisher.

The opinion explicitly separates two situations: training AI models on copyright-protected material on the one hand, and reproducing publishers' work in the responses given to users on the other. It also points out that retrieving protected news content through illegally circumventing paywalls or similar technical measures constitutes one of the infringing scenarios. On the question of whether Google might ultimately be required to pay for the use of news content, the reports state that a ruling against Google requiring such payments could open up new survival opportunities for media outlets of this kind.

According to Golem.de, the opinion submitted to the European Court holds that Google's AI overviews may infringe publishers' neighboring rights and that the related claims could succeed in part. As of now the opinion is only the position of the Advocate General, who has no binding effect on the CJEU, and the case remains pending before the Court.