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When Can an AI Chatbot’s Use of News Articles Infringe Publishers’ Rights?
On 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised that an AI chatbot’s real time retrieval and reuse of press articles may infringe publishers’ rights in some circumstances. The assessment distinguishes protected expression from news facts and considers both how a chatbot accessed an article and what it re...
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Key takeaways
- On 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised that an AI chatbot’s real time retrieval and reuse of press articles may infringe publishers’ rights in some circumstances.
- The assessment distinguishes protected expression from news facts and considers both how a chatbot accessed an article and what it reproduced in its answer.
- Szpunar treated model training separately: the training questions were inadmissible without evidence that Like Company’s articles trained Gemini, and training is not an Article 15 online use.
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In an opinion delivered on 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that an AI chatbot’s real-time retrieval and reuse of online press articles to answer users may, in some circumstances, infringe press publishers’ rights. The opinion in Like Company v Google Ireland, Case C‑250/25, is not a final judgment on whether Google infringed those rights. 1
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Like Company, a Hungarian news publisher, alleged that Google used its articles in Gemini and repeatedly reproduced them through the chatbot between 13 June 2023 and 31 May 2024. Those are allegations in the dispute, not findings of infringement. 1
The key distinction: training a model versus answering a user
The opinion separates two activities that can be blurred in debates about AI and copyright: using material to train a large language model, and retrieving and reusing a press publication in real time to generate an answer.
Szpunar recommended that the questions about whether Like Company’s articles were used for training be declared inadmissible because the case materials did not establish that Gemini had been trained on those articles. He also considered that model training does not qualify as an “online use” of press publications under Article 15 of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. 3
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That does not mean the opinion treats all training on protected material as automatically permitted. It discusses the text-and-data-mining exception as a possible basis for training when its conditions are met, and notes that rightsholders may oppose or license the use of protected content. The opinion also discusses safeguards against memorisation or regurgitation of protected material. 3
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How the opinion assesses chatbot answers
Article 15 gives press publishers rights over the online use of their publications. In considering whether a chatbot’s response may infringe those rights, Szpunar’s analysis distinguishes a publication’s protected expression from the facts it reports: the publisher’s right is not a monopoly over news facts themselves. 4
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The CJEU’s summary identifies two relevant aspects of the reproduction question. One is how the chatbot accessed the publication—for example, whether it circumvented an effective technical measure such as a paywall or a restriction on web-scraping. The other is what the chatbot’s answer reused: merely reporting facts is different from reproducing recognisable elements of the article’s expression. 1
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The opinion also considers when repeated, recognisable reuse in answers could amount to making a publication available to the public. A factor discussed in the case commentary is whether users can get the substance of the article from those answers instead of visiting the original publication. That is a question about the pattern and effect of reuse, not a finding that Gemini did so in this case. 23
Google’s arguments and the limits of the opinion
Google argued that a publisher that leaves articles freely accessible, without measures such as a paywall or anti-scraping restrictions, should be understood to have implicitly consented to their reuse as a basis for chatbot answers. 2 The case therefore turns on more than the fact that an article appears online: the opinion examines access conditions and the character of the material reproduced in responses.
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The available source excerpts do not establish a general rule that chatbot providers are automatically liable, or that every publisher must use technical barriers to retain rights. They also do not support treating the adviser’s opinion as a decision that Google’s specific answers infringed Like Company’s rights. The CJEU press summary describes Szpunar’s proposed approach; the underlying dispute remains to be resolved. 1
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What happens next
An Advocate General’s opinion advises the CJEU but is not binding. The Court must issue its own judgment; the Hungarian court hearing Like Company’s case will then address the dispute in light of the EU-law interpretation. Until those steps are complete, Szpunar’s view is guidance—not a final ruling on liability or compensation. 4
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People also ask
What is the short answer to "When Can an AI Chatbot’s Use of News Articles Infringe Publishers’ Rights?"?
On 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised that an AI chatbot’s real time retrieval and reuse of press articles may infringe publishers’ rights in some circumstances.
What are the key points to validate first?
On 3 November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised that an AI chatbot’s real time retrieval and reuse of press articles may infringe publishers’ rights in some circumstances. The assessment distinguishes protected expression from news facts and considers both how a chatbot accessed an article and what it reproduced in its answer.
What should I do next in practice?
Szpunar treated model training separately: the training questions were inadmissible without evidence that Like Company’s articles trained Gemini, and training is not an Article 15 online use.