EU court adviser: Google’s Gemini may breach publishers’ copyright
An adviser to the EU's top court said on Tuesday that Google's Gemini may infringe press publishers' rights when it reuses their articles to answer queries. Hungarian publisher Like Company brought the case, and a ruling is due in the coming months.
Google suffered a setback at Europe's highest court on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advises the Court of Justice of the European Union. He said Gemini's use of publishers' articles to answer user queries may breach copyright rules. The case pits Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google's AI chatbot. Szpunar said a publisher's rights may be infringed "in certain circumstances" when an AI chatbot pulls an article from a press website, reuses it and passes the answer to a user. He said this applies in two cases. The first is when chatbots unlawfully get around paywalls or other technical barriers. The second is when they reuse "the form of expression of that publication in a recognisable manner". He said copyright does not cover the "mere facts" in news stories, only the way they are written. He also said that using copyrighted material to train large language models is "freely permitted under the text and data mining exception". He found no evidence that Google had used the Hungarian publisher's articles to train Gemini. His opinion is not binding. However, the Luxembourg-based court follows most of its advisers' opinions. It will rule in the coming months. According to Reuters, a…
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