In November 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered an opinion at the Court of Justice of the European Union on the use of press publications by an AI chatbot. The 3 November opinion in Like Company v Google considers how EU press publisher rights might apply when a chatbot retrieves a publication and reuses it in an answer. It is not a judgment; the Court has yet to decide the case.
Training and answers present different questions
The dispute concerns the Gemini chatbot and claims by a Hungarian publisher. The Advocate General advised the Court to treat the training questions as inadmissible in the case, in particular because the record did not establish that the articles at issue had been used for training. He separately discussed how the text and data mining exception could apply. That analysis is not a blanket decision that training on any publication is lawful, nor does it dispose of questions about what a service shows to its users.
The opinion addresses answers generated using material retrieved from the web. The Advocate General distinguishes facts from the particular way a publication expresses them. His analysis gives weight to how a chatbot gained access, including whether it circumvented effective restrictions, and whether an answer reproduces recognisable expression to an extent that can make consulting the original unnecessary. He also considers systematic reuse across related queries and the provider’s role in preventing it. The Court may adopt, modify or reject the proposed approach.
What this means for a professional publisher
An insurance publication may combine public announcements, specialist interviews and original comparative analysis in one article. Each can have different rights and contractual restrictions. Start by recording who owns the relevant material, which sources may be quoted and whether a distributor may index, retrieve or display it. An assistant that supplies a concise answer and a source reference has a different relationship to the original than one designed to reproduce the entire substance of an exclusive article. Whether a particular answer infringes a right depends on the facts and applicable law.
Commercial terms can reflect those differences. A publisher might allow retrieval of short extracts under an enterprise licence, direct users to full analysis and reserve bulk access or reuse for separate terms. To assess that model, it can track which sources were retrieved, whether users followed links and whether the output left anything meaningful for a reader to gain from opening the original. Tracking should reflect the privacy and security constraints of the environment in which the assistant operates.
Make access and output rules testable
Insurers and brokers deploying knowledge assistants can map public sources, subscriptions and content licensed specifically for reuse. A subscription held by a person or department should not be assumed to permit redistribution to all employees or clients. Ask a vendor what happens when a user lacks a source entitlement, when a licence expires or when multiple requests progressively reconstruct a restricted article. Include those scenarios in the acceptance test. A link is useful for verification, but attribution alone does not settle permission to reproduce.
There is also a practical evidence question. If the tool cannot show which document informed an answer, neither the publisher nor the customer can assess whether its licensing rules were followed. Design the records around the source, its access terms and the output restrictions while retaining only the user information needed for the purpose. That provides a basis for investigating complaints and for discussing licence scope with customers.
The opinion gives specialist publishers and their partners a reason to examine retrieval and answer design now, while reserving legal conclusions for the Court’s judgment and case-specific advice. A sensible first step is to test a small set of public, subscriber-only and expressly licensed articles against the same user questions and see where the product fails to respect the intended boundaries.
Sources
Court of Justice of the European Union | Advocate General opinion: 3 November 2026 | Final Court judgment pending EU court adviser says real-time AI reuse may infringe press-publisher rights ; Case C-250/25 Like Company
Share this:
- More [2]
