EU adviser: Google's AI summaries can breach news copyright
An advocate-general at the EU Court of Justice says Google's AI summaries of news can infringe copyright. Last week an Amsterdam court of appeal also ruled that commercial use of short fragments of news articles infringes publishers' rights.
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Illustrative photo: MabelAmber / Pixabay Content LicenseGoogle's AI summaries in some cases infringe the copyright of newspapers and news sites, advocate-general Maciej Szpunar has told the EU Court of Justice in an advisory opinion. A Hungarian media company brought the case against Alphabet, Google's parent company.
Szpunar said copyright law lets AI use the facts a newspaper reports, but the AI must put them in its own words. When a language model takes a publication from a website, rephrases it and presents it to the user, copyright is in some cases infringed, he said.
The opinion also says a chatbot may not bypass a paywall to obtain the information or text it uses for its AI answer.
Google uses its Gemini chatbot to produce the summaries, which it calls an "AI overview" and shows when a user enters a search term. Publishers object to their sites being scraped.
Last week the Amsterdam court of appeal ruled that commercial use of short fragments of news articles infringes publishers' rights. DPG Media and Mediahuis brought the case against HowardsHome, now dissolved. The court held that the company infringed copyright by unlawfully collecting articles and photos and earning money from them.
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advocaat-generaal
An advocate-general is a member of the Court of Justice of the European Union who, in certain cases, gives a public, reasoned opinion before the Court rules, proposing how the case should be decided. The opinion is not binding, but it shows the direction of the legal analysis, and the Court's judges then deliberate and issue their own judgment. In this context, it refers to the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which interprets EU law for all member states, including the Netherlands.