EU Court Adviser Warns AI Chatbots Could Risk Infringing Copyright Law

Tech companies could risk breaching European Union copyright laws when their artificial-intelligence chatbots reuse news articles to generate answers, a top adviser to the bloc’s highest court said.

EU Court of Justice advocate general Maciej Szpunar said Tuesday that a publisher’s rights could be infringed when chatbots retrieve and reuse material from online publications to generate answers to user queries under certain circumstances.

The statement comes after Hungarian digital publisher Like Company challenged Google over its Gemini chatbot service in a domestic court, arguing that the search giant used copyrighted articles to train large language models and repeatedly reproduced them through Gemini between June 2023 and May 2024. Judges in Hungary then turned to the ECJ in Luxembourg for guidance.

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The press publisher’s right does not protect the mere facts reported in press publications, but only the specific form of expression of those publications,” the ECJ said in a statement Tuesday.

The advocate general’s recommendation isn’t binding. It is now up to judges in Hungary to issue a verdict at a later date.

Szpunar said there is no evidence that Like Company’s articles have been used to train Gemini’s models and that they can be trained using copyrighted material under EU law, according to the Luxembourg court.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply content on Google platforms.