European Court of Justice: Using Gemini for Newspaper Articles May Violate Copyright

An advisor to the Court of Justice of the European Union warned yesterday that the use of Google’s artificial intelligence chatbot “Gemini” in generating some of its responses by incorporating journalistic publications could constitute a breach of copyright rules under certain circumstances. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar stated in a legal opinion that publishers’ rights may be infringed when a chatbot based on a large language model retrieves a published article from a news website and reuses it to generate a response for a user. He clarified that legal protection does not cover merely the information and facts contained in publications, but extends to their specific wording and expression. Conversely, he noted that using materials to train AI models is permitted under the legal exception for text and data mining, adding that there is no evidence that articles from the Hungarian company Lycée were used to train the Gemini model. This case follows a lawsuit filed by Lycée, publisher of several Hungarian news websites, against Google over the use of its journalistic publications, marking the first generative AI case to reach the Court of Justice of the European Union, which is expected to deliver its final ruling within approximately six months.