EU court adviser says AI chatbots may infringe copyright, as Brave is sued by publishers

ECJ adviser backs publisher rights over chatbot answers

Szpunar issued his opinion in the first Court of Justice of the European Union case involving generative AI.

If courts follow that reasoning, AI answer engines may need licences for the text they surface, and readers may find paywalls harder to bypass. The opinion is not binding, and no lawsuit in this wave has been decided. The scope of any licence, and the size of any damages, remain unknown.

Szpunar said a chatbot's reproduction depends on how it got the article. Accessing a text unlawfully, for example by circumventing a paywall, counts against the operator. He also said publishers' rights cover the specific form of expression, not the reported facts, and the law should not hand anyone a monopoly on news. Infringement of the right to make content available is generally found when the form of expression in answers is systematically recognizable. At that point readers no longer have reason to open the original.

The ECJ judges will rule later, and the Hungarian court that referred the case is bound by that ruling.

The case began in Hungary. Like Company, which runs several news portals, sued Google there, alleging Gemini reproduced its copyrighted texts without permission and made them available to the public. The Budapest court referred questions of EU law to Luxembourg.

Brave faces two publisher lawsuits in New York

On 2 November 2026, The New York Times Company filed a federal complaint against Brave Software.

The publishers of the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed a separate complaint against Brave the same day in the Southern District of New York. The Times alleges Brave never obtained permission to access, copy or distribute its content and never compensated it. Its filing identifies more than 10 million registered copyrighted works, including material from The New York Times, The Athletic, Cooking, Games and Wirecutter. The other publishers' complaint says their registered newspaper issues contain more than 2 million articles. The publishers also allege that AI companies pay Brave for real-time index content. They name Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, and say the content was used to train models, ground answers, or both.

Both complaints quote Brave's own claim that its index holds more than 30 billion webpages, with millions of new pages added daily. They also allege the company has not disclosed its crawler's name or given site owners a way to block that crawler specifically. The Times describes two letters to Brave chief executive Brendan Eich, the first dated 11 August 2025, demanding an end to unauthorized access and use, and says neither was answered.

The Times ran tests. Ask Brave returned more than 400 words verbatim after being given a paywalled article's URL and then asked for the full text. A separate query to the API's LLM Context endpoint returned 1,291 of 1,295 words from an article verbatim.

Both suits target Brave's Paywall blocker setting, alleging the configured browser copies and displays paywalled articles without a login or subscription. The complaints also allege Brave removes publisher advertising, including subscription prompts, and substitutes advertising sold through Brave Ads. Brave, Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere did not respond to a request for comment, according to UA.NEWS. Perplexity communications director Jesse Dwyer called the claims disinformation.

What courts and regulators have not settled

The Brave complaints are civil suits, and the publishers' allegations have not been tested in court.

Szpunar called two questions from the Hungarian court about AI training inadmissible, because there was no evidence that the plaintiff's articles were used to train Gemini. He noted that using protected works to train a model is freely permitted under the text and data mining exception.

That leaves the practical question open: whether answer engines need licences for the text they surface, and what such a licence would cost. Neither the ECJ nor any US court has answered it.