An opinion by an adviser to the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s top court, has indicated that the use of AI bots to provide users with summaries of publishers’ articles may contravene copyright law. The case involves a dispute brought by Hungary’s Like Company against Google, initially over a summary the company said indicated unauthorised use of its content by Google’s Bard and later Gemini chatbots. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar indicated that the specific example used by Like Company probably did not contravene copyright law, as it appeared to be an AI “hallucination” providing fabricated facts, rather than an actual summary of one of the articles hosted by Like Company. However, Szpunar’s opinion indicated that the news article summaries routinely displayed by Gemini, based on material found online, may infringe copyright. Szpunar said a press publisher’s right may be infringed in certain circumstances when an LLM-driven chatbot retrieves a publication from a press publisher’s website, reuses that publication to generate an answer, and provides that answer to the user, including if the chatbot evaded blocks such as paywalls to retrieve the article, or provides a summary close enough to the original that the user doesn’t need to read the initial article. Chatbot summaries could violate publishers’ right of reproduction if they reuse “the form of expression of that publication in a recognisable manner”, rather than solely facts, he wrote. He said the