[Hfuffzehn]

Yes, the monopoly is not relevant for the court.

It is relevant for Google though, because they want to transfer it to another product.

And the court is saying that whatever that new product is, Google is not allowed to mislead the public by pretending it is search.

[fauigerzigerk]

I'm not sure. Is it really just the misleading part that the court takes issue with, i.e portraying Gemini output as a search result?

In my view, the ruling could mean that Gemini's output is legally seen as first-person speech by Google regardless of where it is published.

[Ekaros]

I think that will depend. If person publishes it as their own speech Google is likely not fully liable. On other hand as Google publishes it as their own speech on their own site well they are fully liable.

To me it seems pretty reasonable that content Google generates with Gemini and publishes on their own google.com domain is their speech. Or at least they are fully editorially responsible.

[Hfuffzehn]

Sure that could be the worst case. But then we are in the case law vs. continental law debate for lawyers.

When I wrote "Gemini is not illegal" it would have been more correct to say that the court has not decided about Gemini but specifically about search.

And I do think it makes sense to distinguish between explicitly chatting with an LLM and entering something in the search bar people have used for decades now.

[fauigerzigerk]

I completely agree with you that this particular ruling does not make Gemini illegal in Germany.

I'm just wondering whether the logic of the ruling is tied to the specific context (search results) or applied more generally to LLM generated text.

[danaris]

Based on the article, the problem isn't that Google is attempting to present the AI Overview as "search" to the users. Google is attempting to claim to the court that AI Overviews are just like search, and the court isn't buying it.

The problem here is that

1) the AI Overview is giving incorrect information, and

2) it is Google's own words

...which makes Google liable for anything false there.

They weren't liable for false statements in search results, because that was 100% other people's content, being linked to, with a small blurb taken directly from their words. With the AI Overviews, regardless of whether it's getting its information from other people's content, it's remixing it based on Gemini's algorithms and synthesising statements that are frequently wrong.

[sgc]

The ai legal situation is going to go through growing pains. I am abstracting from the specific laws of any one country, just thinking about the general context:

If ai output is not copyrightable, it should not be considered personal output. So nobody should be responsible for it. Or if it is considered personal output, it should be copyrightable. Or perhaps the ai companies will be liable for all output, and they will therefore all cease to exist in any useful form? This seems like another alternative, where the output legal value is not central, but there will be a thousand different fights about how it is presented to others.

[danaris]

That's trying to apply two completely separate legal frameworks, with different purposes, and force them to come to the same conclusion about one aspect of each of them. It's not that simple.

It's perfectly legally consistent to say that AI-generated content has no copyright (because it's the product of a computer, not a human), and also that the human or organization operating an AI is legally responsible for anything in its output that is legally actionable.

Someone needs to hold legal responsibility for any piece of content out there. You can't just wrap your decisions in AI and get to be free of all liability for it.

But copyright isn't like that. There's nothing lost to society by saying that content is not copyrightable, and particularly given how the major LLMs were trained, there's a lot lost to society by saying that they can take all of that from everyone without consent, and then everything it produces has copyright and can be used for, say, Google's profit in perpetuity.

[sgc]

Yes, I was not sufficiently thinking about copyright as an arbitrary legal construct that can be manipulated at will. I don't think output should have copyright, but I would presume the copyright should it ever exist would belong to the user and not the LLM creator, just like photoshop does not give adobe rights to user output. However much like there is no copyright, the uncertain output from an LLM should never directly create legal liability - the user prompt and intention should, and legal standards regarding recklessness and malice should apply. Otherwise it's a bit like blaming somebody for the output of a roulette wheel.

So I think I like the current decision which is more about presentation, dissemination, application, and claims than content, and there should of course be liability for LLM creators if they are not actively dealing with results like CP, violence, or many other illegal or dangerous things.

[Hfuffzehn]

The argument starts with

search engine -> search terms -> search command

Google accepted the argument up to that point. Then they argued that they are not responsible for the search result. The court argued that what they did was not a search (or not protected the way a search is).

The argument whether Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude are search engines and whether a prompt is search terms is a different argument. Certainly an interesting one, but not what that court looked at.

It's not just about the output, the input matters also.