Opinion: Case C-250/25 Like Company

On Tuesday 3 November 2026, Maciej Szpunar, First Advocate General of the Court of Justice, delivered his Opinion in Case C-250/25 Like Company.

In his Opinion, First Advocate General Szpunar examined whether an LLM-powered chatbot’s retrieval and reuse of a press publication to generate an answer for a user constitutes “reproduction” and “communication to the public” under EU law.

Google Gemini is an Artificial Intelligence-driven “chatbot” powered by large language models (LLMs), complex neural networks trained on vast amounts of text, often collected from the Internet, to generate natural-language responses. Using a technology called “Retrieval-Augmented Generation”, it can retrieve information from the web in real time and generate summaries of online content, including the latest news.

Under EU law, press publishers enjoy the exclusive right to “reproduce” and “make available to the public” their publications in respect of their online use. They argue that LLM-driven chatbots violate their rights and interests by generating summaries based on news articles “scraped” from their websites without authorisation or compensation, and by potentially diverting readers from the original articles and reducing publishers’ revenue.

Like Company is a Hungarian operator of various web portals on which it publishes information articles. It claimed that Gemini’s LLMs had been trained on articles from its website and that the chatbot could produce summaries of those articles on demand and took the matter to court. The Hungarian court hearing the case therefore asked the Court of Justice whether this use of material by an AI service such as Gemini constitutes “reproduction” and “communication to the public” under EU law.

In the short video below, First Advocate General Szpunar explains his Opinion in this case. Subtitles are available in all official EU languages and may be activated by clicking the “Subtitles” icon.

You can also consult the press release  for more information.