After the United States and China, the time has come for the European Court of Justice to speak out about the potential infringement of copyrights by AI. This time the case is directed at the AI chatbot Gemini (formerly Bard) of Google.
At the Hungarian website www.balatonkornyeke.hu, an article describes how the well-known Hungarian singer Kozsó plans to keep dolphins in an aquarium near Lake Balaton. When Gemini received the prompt: ‘Could you prepare a summary in Hungarian of the online article about Kozsó's plans for putting dolphins in the lake, which was published on balatonkornyeke.hu?“, the chatbot created an answer that included information from the original article (according to the Hungarian Court of Appeal).
According to Like Company, the website publisher, Gemini infringes its copyrights by doing this. Like Company relied on the press publishers’ right as set out in Article 15 of the DSM Directive.
Before assessing the matter, the Hungarian Court asked a few essential questions to the ECJ:
- Should Gemini’s answer, which is partially identical to the contents of the article, be regarded as a communication to the public?
- Should the training process described by Google be regarded as a reproduction? And if so, does this fall under the commercial TDM exception from Article 4 of the DSM Directive?
- Is the provider of a chatbot responsible for an answer that represents (in part) the contents of a press publication on the basis of a user’s prompt?
Again, this is an AI case that may be formative to the copyright landscape. This case forces the ECJ not only to pronounce an opinion on AI and copyright, but also to speak out about the application of the press publishers’ right.
