On November 3, 2026, Maciej Szpunar, the Court of Justice of the European Union’s First Advocate General, delivered a nonbinding Opinion in Case C-250/25, a Hungarian publisher’s case about Google Gemini and news copyright. The case asks whether a chatbot’s retrieval and reuse of a press article to answer a user amounts to “reproduction” and “communication to the public” under EU law, as the CJEU’s case notice explains.
The copyright questions behind Gemini’s news answers
The CJEU describes Gemini’s Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as retrieving web information in real time and generating summaries of online material, including news. The legal questions concern that retrieval and reuse of press publications in responses.
TechRepublic reports that Szpunar’s Opinion identified unlawful access, including bypassing effective technical protections, and answers that recognizably reproduce enough of an article to substitute for reading it as possible grounds for infringement. Under that reported analysis, repeating the same facts alone would not meet the proposed test. The Opinion is advisory; the CJEU issues the judgment in the case.
Training is a separate issue in the case
Like Company alleged that its articles had been used to train Gemini and could be summarized on demand. TechRepublic reported that the case lacked evidence establishing that Like Company’s articles were used for training, and that Szpunar recommended the Court not answer the training questions on that basis. The point concerns this publisher’s articles in this proceeding.
TechRepublic reported on November 4, 2026, that the CJEU had not yet issued a judgment.
