European Court of Justice Advisor: Use of Gemini Robot for Press Releases May Violate Copyright

Brussels -- An advisor to the Court of Justice of the European Union warned on Tuesday that the use of Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot in drafting press releases in some of its responses could constitute a breach of copyright rules under certain circumstances. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar stated in his legal opinion that publishers’ rights may be infringed when a chatbot based on large language models retrieves a published article from a news website and reuses it to generate a response for the 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 publisher Lycée Company were used to train the Gemini model. This case follows the lawsuit filed by Lycée Company, which publishes several Hungarian news websites, against Google over the use of its press content, 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. (End) AN / N.S.A.