On November 3, 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered a nonbinding opinion in Case C-250/25 proposing that some Gemini answers could infringe EU press publishers’ rights. The proposed analysis focuses on how a publication was accessed and whether an answer reuses recognizable expression enough to spare users from consulting the original. The Court of Justice of the European Union’s release summarizes the opinion and the case’s status that day.
What the opinion proposes for Gemini answers
The CJEU release describes Gemini as using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), also called grounding, to retrieve web information in real time for responses. Szpunar’s proposed analysis concerns the EU press-publisher right in Article 15(1) of Directive (EU) 2019/790. That right covers a publication’s particular form of expression, not the reported facts themselves.
For the reproduction right, the opinion’s proposed criteria include whether the chatbot obtained access unlawfully, such as by bypassing an effective paywall or another technical measure, and whether its answer reused recognizable expression to an extent that users would not need to consult the original. A separate issue is making a publication available to the public: Szpunar said that right may be implicated when recognizable expression appears systematically in answers to related queries and users are thereby spared the original.
The proposed analysis turns on access, recognizable expression and whether the answer displaces the original publication.
Szpunar also proposed that a chatbot provider could be liable for uses inherent in its business model or for failing to establish appropriate, credible and effective countermeasures. These are proposals in a nonbinding opinion, not a ruling adopted by the court.
Why the training questions were treated separately
The opinion advised that two questions about training be declared inadmissible. The CJEU release said the case file contained no evidence that Like Company’s articles were used to train Gemini; it also said model training is not itself an online use of press publications.
Separately, for completeness, Szpunar said that training on protected works is, as a rule, permitted under the text-and-data-mining exception in Article 4 of the directive. That general legal observation is distinct from the case-specific training questions.
The case’s status on November 3, 2026
Like Company brought the case against Google Ireland Ltd. The Hungarian court referred four questions to the CJEU: two about using press publications to train a language model and two about chatbot answers. The CJEU interprets EU law; the national court handles the underlying dispute. In its November 3 release, the CJEU said judges were beginning deliberations and that judgment would follow later.
