A hearing doesn’t produce a ruling. But this one signals how seriously the EU’s highest court is treating the question.
On March 10, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union held what Bird & Bird describes as the first-ever oral hearing on generative AI and copyright in the CJEU’s history. The case is Like Company v Google Ireland Limited, docket number C-250/25. The fact that the CJEU convened an oral hearing, rather than proceeding on written submissions alone, indicates the court views the legal questions as significant enough to warrant direct argument.
The case and the claims
According to Bird & Bird’s analysis of the hearing, Like Company is a Hungarian digital media company. The company alleges that Google’s Gemini model extracted and displayed copyrighted content from news portals for AI training without authorization or payment. The alleged infringement period runs from June 13, 2023 to February 7, 2024.
The defendant is Google Ireland Limited, the EU-registered entity through which Google operates its services in European markets. The case therefore engages directly with how EU copyright law applies to the development and training of a frontier AI model by one of the world’s largest technology companies.
Why the CJEU, and why now
EU copyright law governs through directives implemented by Member States, but the CJEU provides binding interpretations when national courts refer questions of EU law. If the CJEU issues a substantive ruling in C-250/25, it would bind courts across all 27 Member States when they assess generative AI copyright claims. That’s a different order of significance than any individual national court decision.
The March 10 hearing addressed the territorial scope of EU copyright and the legal framework for LLM development, according to Bird & Bird’s report. These are foundational questions. The territorial scope question matters because AI training is a global activity, where training occurs, and which national copyright law governs, has been an open issue across multiple jurisdictions.
The positions at the hearing
Bird & Bird’s analysis indicates that the hearing revealed sharply diverging positions among Member States, the European Commission, and the parties themselves. Specific positions and their substance are attributed to Bird & Bird’s hearing report, as no independent transcript or second source is yet available. The significance of Member State divergence is substantive: it signals the court cannot rely on a unified policy preference in its deliberations and must resolve the legal question on its own analysis of the directives.
The broader context
This hearing follows the CJEU proceedings by roughly a year of national-level litigation and regulatory activity across Europe on AI and copyright. It arrives in the same regulatory moment as the UK’s Licensing-First pivot and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Thaler denial, three major jurisdictions are actively drawing lines around AI-generated and AI-trained content simultaneously.
The EU AI Act’s copyright-adjacent provisions (particularly on training data transparency and GPAI model obligations) are already in force or approaching their compliance dates. A CJEU ruling in C-250/25 would operate alongside, not instead of, those AI Act obligations.
What to watch
CJEU oral hearings typically precede opinions by an Advocate General, followed by a Grand Chamber or chamber ruling, a timeline that commonly spans six months to over a year. There is no published ruling date for C-250/25. Watch for: the Advocate General’s opinion (when issued, it’s an early signal of the court’s likely direction), any interim orders or preliminary measures, and national court decisions in Member States that may reference the CJEU referral while awaiting the final ruling.
TJS synthesis
Three jurisdictions, three decisions, three different approaches, all in the same month. The U.S. Supreme Court closed the door on AI copyright claims at the output level. The UK rejected the opt-out and turned to market licensing. Now the EU’s highest court is examining what EU copyright law says about the input, what AI systems can lawfully train on. When the CJEU issues its ruling in C-250/25, it will affect every GPAI model provider operating in Europe. That’s not a national question. That’s a global compliance question for every major AI lab with EU market exposure.