Europe's Top Court Takes Up Gemini and Copyright

The question of whether an AI chatbot breaks copyright law when it summarizes a news article has mostly been fought in American courts. This week it reached the highest court in Europe, in a case that could set the terms for the whole continent.

The dispute is Like Company v Google Ireland, catalogued at the Court of Justice of the European Union as case C-250/25. The claimant is a Hungarian press publisher that runs several news portals. It argues that Google's Gemini chatbot, asked by users about the news, produced summaries drawn from its articles without consent or payment. A Budapest court referred the questions to Luxembourg in April 2025, and the Court of Justice heard arguments in March. It is the first case the court has taken on generative AI and copyright.

At the stage reached this week, an Advocate General, Maciej Szpunar, delivered his opinion. According to MLex, the opinion had been scheduled for November 3 after an earlier date was dropped. The point to hold onto is procedural but important: an Advocate General's opinion is advice, not a verdict. It proposes how the court should resolve the legal questions. The judges follow that advice in most cases, though not all, and their binding ruling will come later.

What the case actually turns on

The publisher's claim rests on the press publishers' right created by Article 15 of the EU's 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, the provision that lets news organizations control the online reuse of their content. The core issues the court must untangle are whether a chatbot's output that reproduces the distinctive expression of an article counts as a communication to the public, how any copyright exception for text and data mining applies to a system answering live user queries, and whether producing a summary on demand is different in law from storing and republishing the text.

Reporting on the opinion indicated that the Advocate General left room for infringement to be found where a chatbot reproduces a publisher's protected expression or reaches content that sits behind a paywall, while treating the use of facts and short fragments more permissively. That characterization should be read with some caution until the full opinion is public, but the direction fits the questions the court agreed to consider.

Why publishers are watching

For news organizations across the EU, the stakes are concrete. A reading of Article 15 that reaches chatbot answers would hand publishers leverage to demand licensing deals from AI companies, much as they once did with news aggregators. A narrow reading would leave them watching their work feed a product they cannot bill for. The same fight is already live elsewhere. Only days ago, the New York Times and Tribune newspapers sued the browser maker Brave over scraping behind their paywalls.

A court that is cautious about admissibility may yet decide the Gemini case narrowly, or send parts of it back to Hungary. But the Advocate General's opinion is the first real signal of how Europe's judges are thinking about a problem every publisher and every AI company on the continent needs answered.