EU Court Advisor Warns Google AI Chatbot May Breach Copyright Rules

A top adviser to the European Union's highest court has expressed concerns that Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, may infringe upon the copyright of publishers. The case, brought by a Hungarian website operator, Like Company, against Google's AI, is currently under consideration by the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union. At issue is whether Gemini's use of copyrighted material to generate responses violates publishers' rights.

According to Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, Gemini may infringe upon publishers' rights when it reproduces recognizable portions of their articles or bypasses paywalls and technical barriers to access the content. The right of reproduction may be infringed in such circumstances, he said. However, copyright rules do not protect the mere facts reported by press publications; only the specific form of expression is protected.

Szpunar also noted that the use of copyrighted material to train LLMs (large language models) is permitted under the text and data mining exception. He stated that there is no evidence that Google had utilized the Hungarian publisher's articles to train Gemini. The court will likely make its decision in the coming months, weighing the interests of publishers and Google's dominant position in online search.