Hungary - Like Company v Google Ireland Limited, 3 April 2025

Claimant: Like Company (a commercial company incorporated in Hungary, press publisher and operator of various news portals) 

Defendant: Google Ireland Limited

Preliminary ruling request lodged on 3 April 2025 (The starting date of the main proceedings is not publicly available.) 

The Claimant’s claim concerns the period between 13 June 2023 and 7 February 2024.

The Claimant, as a press publisher, principally published literary works of a journalistic nature which are accessible to internet users. The Claimant displays advertisements on its interfaces, for which it receives advertising revenue in proportion to the number of users who visit each interface. 

In response to a specific question, the Defendant’s generative AI chatbot (Gemini) provided a detailed response, which included a summary of the contents of articles published by the Claimant.

The generative AI chatbot functions in a similar way to search engines and helps to create new content, such as images, music and code. The generative AI chatbot has been trained by means of the observation and matching of patterns (known as ‘string searching’). This makes it possible to initiate ‘conversations’ with the chatbot, in which users can obtain detailed information about, inter alia, the content of press publications, and, in certain cases, create summaries of those publications. When a chatbot directly quotes a longer passage from a web page, it highlights that page, which enables users to access the source directly with a single click.

Gemini is a basic model of the large language model (LLM) type. It is neither an information database, nor an information retrieval system. It does not store copies of the data collected, but rather it converts them into tokens – that is, it breaks the texts down into minimum units – and processes them.

The chatbot does not have a fixed database from which it is able to retrieve any data content at the request of users. It uses the Google Search database to collect data and usually suggests that the user search for the subject in question in Google Search afterwards. When it is asked a specific question directly, the chatbot can provide a response that displays the content of a protected press publication.

Claimant’s claim

According to the Claimant, the extent of the use exceeds the ‘use of individual words or very short extracts of a press publication’. Without the publisher’s consent, the title of a press publication, at most, may be used free of charge. Also, what constitutes a ‘very short extract’ cannot be determined based on the length of the publications, since to do so could cause significant economic harm in the case of longer texts.

The fact that the Claimant gave its consent for its content to be displayed in search engines does not mean that it also consented to the communication of that content. The Defendant did not pay any compensation and, therefore, there is no basis for consent. 

The Claimant also argues that the responses given by the chatbot constitute an instance of communication to the public, even when the chatbot does not respond to the user’s question on a search engine results page generated on a new website, but rather in the form of chat in the chatbot interface, displaying protected content.

Defendant’s defence

The Defendant argues that it did not use any Hungarian hardware infrastructure to train the chatbot; training did not take place in Hungary and, and therefore, Hungarian law is not applicable.

According to the Defendant, displaying the responses in the chatbot does not constitute reproduction, or making available to the public. The chatbot’s responses do not reach a ‘new public’, but rather they may be accessed by the same public that is able to access the content originally uploaded; that is, all internet users. Moreover, the responses displayed do not reach the threshold for the application of ‘individual words or very short extracts’.

Even if the Court agrees with the Claimant that displaying the responses constituted an instance of reproduction or making available to the public, such reproduction would still be covered by the exception provided for in the cases of temporary acts of reproduction and text and data mining.

Furthermore, the content of the response given by the chatbot is not identical to that of the relevant press articles. The response only refers to some of the facts appearing in the Claimant’s articles . On the other hand, it also contains other information not sourced from the Claimant’s protected press publications. That additional information – and, therefore, most of the response – was simply a product of ‘hallucination’ on the part of the chatbot.