EU adviser says Gemini answers may infringe press rights

Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said Google’s Gemini chatbot may infringe press publishers’ rights when it uses protected expression from articles in answers to users, but his nonbinding opinion does not decide whether Google violated the law in a case brought by Hungarian publisher Like Company. Szpunar’s proposed distinction is between training an artificial intelligence model and what a chatbot later returns to users. He said the EU text-and-data-mining exception may permit training on copyrighted material, while a publisher’s rights may be infringed if a chatbot retrieves an article, reuses its protected expression to generate an answer and provides that answer to a user. Reporting facts alone is not protected by the press publishers’ right, he said; the right covers the specific form of expression. The case record contained no evidence that Like Company’s articles were used to train Gemini, Szpunar said. He recommended treating the questions about training as hypothetical. In an alternative analysis, he said the exception could apply if material was lawfully accessible and the rights holder had not appropriately reserved its rights against that use. Like Company alleges...