Google Gemini may breach EU copyright rules, adviser says

Google's Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot could breach EU copyright rules when it uses press publications in certain answers, an adviser to the European Union's top court said Tuesday.

The opinion by Advocate General Maciej Szpunar came in the first generative AI case to reach the European Court of Justice. Hungarian press publisher Like Company took Google to court over the use of articles from its online news portals.

Szpunar said using material to train an AI model is “freely permitted under the text and data mining exception”. He also said there was no evidence that Like Company's articles had been used to train Gemini.

But he recommended that the court focus its ruling on the chatbot's answers. Szpunar said that when a large language model chatbot retrieves a press publication from a publisher's website, reuses it to generate an answer and provides that answer to a user, the publisher's right may be infringed in certain circumstances.

He said the publisher's right does not protect “mere facts” but only the specific form of expression. A judgment is expected in about six months.

A Google spokesperson said Gemini learns linguistic patterns to create original outputs rather than replicating content, and said publishers have controls that allow them to opt out. Google also welcomed the opinion's recognition that EU law permits AI training on publicly available information.

The advocate general's opinion is not binding on the court, but it is influential.