A central lawsuit brought by a Hungarian website operator against Google has prompted the Advocate General at the Court of Justice of the European Union to formally issue an official opinion, clearly clarifying the copyright boundaries for artificial intelligence when handling news content. The opinion states that under certain circumstances, Google's AI chatbot Gemini may violate copyright rules by using news reports. If it illegally bypasses paywalls or uses other means to obtain content, or reuses the specific expression of news reports in an identifiable way in its answers, it may infringe publishers' reproduction rights.
Drawing the Legal Boundary: Mere Facts Are Not Protected, and Training Models Is a Lawful Exception
In this legal opinion, which has attracted widespread industry attention, the Advocate General broke down in detail the scope of copyright protection and the compliance of large-model training:
The Boundary of Copyright Protection: Copyright rules explicitly state that mere facts in news are not protected, and only the specific expression of those facts is protected. This means that it is not in itself a violation for AI to scrape and summarize the objective facts behind news; the key lies in the extent to which the original text is reused when generating content.
The Text and Data Mining (TDM) Exception: The current text and data mining (TDM) exception allows copyrighted material to be used to train large language models within a compliant framework.
Far-Reaching Industry Impact: Non-Binding Opinion May Bring a Turning Point for Traditional Media
It should be noted that the opinion itself is not directly legally binding, but it is usually taken into account and adopted by judges of the European Court of Justice when making a final ruling.
Analysts point out that if the court ultimately rules against Google, it may bring relevant online media new opportunities for survival and greater confidence to defend their rights. Previously, because AI chatbots directly generated news summaries in place of traditional search results with outbound links, traditional media websites saw severe declines in organic traffic and advertising revenue. The evolution of this legal dispute may, in the future, help drive the establishment of a fairer mechanism for content use and benefit-sharing between tech giants and news publishers.
