Challenge: separate the facts from the form
An Advocate General at the EU Court of Justice says the press publishers' right protects form, not facts. Here is an exercise to find out where that line really runs.
On Tuesday 3 November, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his opinion in Case C-250/25, Like Company v Google. A Hungarian publisher is challenging the answers given by Google's chatbot, which retrieves articles online to answer questions about the news.
His position, in short. The press publishers' right in Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 can be infringed. But only under certain conditions. It matters whether the content was obtained by circumventing technical measures, such as a paywall or an anti-scraping block. And it matters whether the answer reuses the article's form of expression in a recognisable way, to the point that the user no longer needs to read the original. On model training, he considers the questions inadmissible; he only adds that, as a rule, it is permitted under the text and data mining exception.
The core of it sits in one line of the Court's press release: the publisher's right "does not protect the mere facts reported in press publications". It protects form. Not the news.
This is an opinion, not a judgment. The Court will rule later and is not bound by it.
The line nobody knows how to draw
Facts on one side, form on the other. Clear on paper. Not in practice.
Anyone who writes well knows that form is the work: what goes first, the detail that makes it click, the order that guides the reader. It is the same work I do when I rewrite a clause so it can be understood. A good summary keeps the facts and drops the form. And that is exactly why it often makes the original unnecessary.
The proposed test asks two things at once: whether the form is recognisable, and whether the reader still needs the source. Those are two different questions. I want to see if we can keep them apart.
The challenge
Pick an article you read this week. Any article, any outlet.
Write only the facts, in three lines. No adjectives borrowed from the author, no recognisable phrasing.
Then answer two questions. Does someone reading your three lines still need the article? And what did you lose along the way?
Send it all to marco@giacomello.digital with the subject "Facts and form". Include the link to the article, not the text.
What I will do
I will collect the most interesting replies, with the senders' consent. I will compare them in an upcoming episode: where the line runs for readers, and where the law puts it. If the two lines do not match, we have a design problem.
Personal reflection, not legal advice.