CJEU, Grand Chamber, 12 May 2026, Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd v Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, Case C‑797/23
“The organisational and financial contribution of publishers in producing press publications needs to be recognised and further encouraged to ensure the sustainability of the publishing industry.” This wording of recital 55 of Directive 2019/790 sums up the ambition behind the adoption of Article 15 of that text; it also sums up, by implication, the powerlessness that the EU legislature sought to overcome. The judgment delivered on 12 May 2026 by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union in Meta Platforms Ireland[1] is the first comprehensive interpretation of that provision and lays down, for the future, the conditions under which Member States may organise the effective exercise of the neighbouring rights it establishes.
The case arose from an action brought by Meta before the Regional Administrative Court for Lazio against a decision of the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (“AGCOM”) setting out the criteria for determining the “fair compensation” owed by information society service providers to press publishers for the online use of their publications. The Italian law transposing Article 15 of Directive 2019/790[2] had established an ambitious framework, imposing obligations of negotiation, transparency and non-retaliation on platforms, while conferring regulatory, decision-making and sanctioning powers on AGCOM.
Meta disputed the compatibility of this framework both with Article 15 of the Directive, on the ground that it establishes exclusive rights of a preventive nature and not a mere right to remuneration, and with the freedom to conduct a business guaranteed by Article 16 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The referring court, sharing some of these doubts, referred three questions to the Court for a preliminary ruling.
The legal issue may be framed as follows: do Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 and Articles 16 and 52 of the Charter preclude national legislation which, while transposing the exclusive rights of press publishers, establishes a fair compensation mechanism coupled with obligations on service providers and powers of public intervention?
The Court, essentially following the Opinion of Advocate General Szpunar[3], answers in the negative, subject to specific conditions. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a doctrine of the effectiveness of neighbouring rights in the digital environment, the lessons of which extend beyond the press sector alone.
The judgment should be analysed in two stages. We will first examine how the Court consolidates the regime of press publishers’ neighbouring rights by affirming the principle of full harmonisation combined with national latitude as to the arrangements for implementation (I), before assessing the scope of this decision beyond the press sector, and in particular with a view to litigation against providers of artificial intelligence systems that infringe the rights of holders of neighbouring rights (II).
I. Consolidating press publishers’ neighbouring rights in the digital environment
The Court proceeds in two complementary steps: it first affirms the inviolability of the substantive content of the exclusive rights established by Article 15 of the Directive (A), before recognising that Member States have a broad margin of discretion in organising their effective exercise (B).
A. Full harmonisation of the content of the exclusive rights
The first contribution of the judgment lies in the characterisation of the rights conferred on press publishers by Article 15 of Directive 2019/790. The Court states, with a clarity that leaves no room for ambiguity, that this provision, read in conjunction with Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29, “constitutes a measure of full harmonisation of the substantive content of the rights referred to therein”[4]. Member States therefore have no margin of discretion to regulate the substance of those rights.
This characterisation has two consequences. The first concerns the very nature of the rights at issue. The Court recalls that the rights of reproduction and making available to the public enjoyed by press publishers are, like those provided for by Directive 2001/29, “exclusive rights of a preventive nature”, which means that any use of the publications they protect requires the prior consent of the rightholder[5]. The Court derives a categorical prohibition from this: States may not “replace the exclusive rights of a preventive nature with a mere right to compensation”[6]. Italy therefore could not, under the guise of transposition, reduce the right to authorise or prohibit to a right to receive payment.
The second consequence concerns the relationship between this exclusive character and the possibility of remuneration. The Court does not confine itself to a rigid opposition between an exclusive right and a right to remuneration. It recognises that the rights under Article 15 imply, “by their nature”, that publishers may make their authorisation conditional on remuneration they consider appropriate[7]. The very objective of the Directive, which is to ensure that the investments needed to produce press publications can be recouped, requires this reading. The Court thus defuses Meta’s criticism that any reference to remuneration would be contrary to the exclusive nature of the rights.
The Court nevertheless attaches two insurmountable limits to this recognition. Publishers must retain the option of authorising the use of their publications free of charge, including through free non-exclusive licences[8]. And service providers must remain free not to use those publications, since no payment obligation may be imposed on them unrelated to actual or intended use[9]. The exclusive right cannot be turned into an automatic claim for payment.
B. National latitude in the arrangements for implementation: effectiveness as an imperative
The second contribution of the judgment, perhaps the most significant in practice, lies in the recognition of a broad margin of discretion for Member States in organising the arrangements for implementing the rights under Article 15[10]. The Court upholds the Italian framework in its entirety, both as regards the obligations imposed on service providers and the powers conferred on AGCOM.
As regards the obligations imposed on platforms, the Court accepts that States may require service providers to enter into negotiations, to disclose the data needed to determine remuneration and to refrain from limiting the visibility of publications in search results during negotiations. The justification it adopts is decisive: these obligations are consistent with Article 15 because they seek to correct the information asymmetry and the imbalance in bargaining power that exist between publishers and platforms[11]. Only service providers hold the information needed to assess the economic value of the online use of publications; the transparency obligation restores the conditions for fair negotiation[12].
The Court adopts the same reasoning with regard to AGCOM’s powers. The measures of public intervention are “fully compatible” with Article 15 in so far as they concern the arrangements for implementing the exclusive rights and do not disregard either their nature or their scope[13]. The Court is careful to note that the parties remain free not to conclude a contract and that the amount determined by the authority is not binding.
With regard to the Charter, the judgment carries out an exemplary balancing exercise. While recognising that the obligations imposed on platforms constitute limitations on their freedom to conduct a business within the meaning of Article 16 of the Charter, the Court nevertheless holds those limitations to be justified and proportionate. The reasoning rests on weighing three fundamental rights: the platforms’ freedom to conduct a business, the publishers’ intellectual property right enshrined in Article 17(2) of the Charter, and the freedom and pluralism of the media guaranteed by Article 11(2)[14]. The Court recalls that Article 11 of the Charter constitutes “one of the essential foundations of a democratic and pluralist society”, which gives the objectives pursued by the Italian legislation considerable weight in the balance. The maximum financial penalty of 1 % of turnover is held to be proportionate in view of the operators’ financial capacity[15].
II. Lessons from the judgment for artificial intelligence providers
The Meta judgment concerns the neighbouring rights of press publishers; it does not deal directly with the use of protected works to train artificial intelligence models. The principles it establishes can nevertheless be applied by analogy to litigation between rightholders and AI system providers, since Directive 2019/790 provides the common normative framework for both issues (A). Moreover, the analytical framework used by the Court to assess the balance of power between rightholders and platforms casts a favourable light on the position of the former in future litigation (B).
A. The preventive nature of exclusive rights: the requirement of prior authorisation
The statement that the rights established by Directive 2019/790 are exclusive rights of a preventive nature, requiring the prior consent of the rightholder, sheds light on litigation relating to the training of AI models, although applying it requires some contextualisation. Article 4 of the same Directive provides for an exception to the reproduction right for text and data mining[16]. This exception, which applies automatically where the work is lawfully accessible, in principle dispenses with the need for prior consent. However, it ceases to apply where the rightholder has expressly reserved the use of its works through an opt-out mechanism, in particular by machine-readable means (Article 4(3))[17]. Where such a reservation has been expressed, or where the use goes beyond the scope of the text and data mining exception, the use of works to train a model falls back within the scope of the exclusive rights and constitutes a reproduction subject to the prior consent of the author or the holder of neighbouring rights. It is in that scenario that the principles of the Meta judgment regain their full force.
The categorical prohibition set out by the Court in paragraph 62 of the judgment, according to which a State may not replace the exclusive rights under the Directive with a mere right to compensation, reinforces this analysis.
By analogy, AI system providers cannot argue that a flat-rate payment after the event would suffice to cure the infringement of the rights of authors and holders of neighbouring rights whose works have been ingested without authorisation. EU law requires prior consent; remuneration is merely its possible counterpart, not a substitute for it.
Advocate General Szpunar’s observation on how Facebook operates reinforces this reading. Analysing the platform’s algorithmic model, he notes that Facebook is “a genuine autonomous content provider, whose specific feature is that the content is neither created nor purchased by it”[18]. This characterisation can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to providers of AI models that massively ingest protected works without having acquired them or obtained the authorisation of their rightholders. The fact that the use is algorithmic rather than editorial does not alter the nature of the act of reproduction, which falls within the exclusive rights.
B. Rebalancing the balance of power: transparency, asymmetry and public intervention
The second set of lessons concerns the Court’s recognition of the structural imbalance that characterises the relationship between rightholders and large digital platforms. The judgment endorses the idea that this imbalance justifies corrective mechanisms that go beyond the mere affirmation of exclusive rights.
In this respect, the position of authors and holders of neighbouring rights vis-à-vis AI system providers bears striking similarities to that of press publishers vis-à-vis platforms. The information asymmetry is even more pronounced: AI providers alone know the composition of their training datasets, the nature of the works ingested, the volume of reproductions made and the value those reproductions have added to their models. Rightholders usually do not know whether their works have been used, to what extent and for whose benefit. The transparency obligation upheld by the Court in the context of Article 15 provides a useful precedent for grounding a pre-action request for information or for justifying, before the court, a reversal of the burden of proof.
The Court’s balancing of fundamental rights can also be applied by analogy. AI system providers will, as Meta did in the present case, invoke the freedom to conduct a business in order to challenge any obligation to negotiate, to be transparent or to pay remuneration. The Meta judgment teaches that this freedom, however important, is not absolute and must be reconciled with the intellectual property right enshrined in Article 17(2) of the Charter. The Court recalls that the freedom to conduct a business “may be subject to a broad range of interventions on the part of public authorities which may limit the exercise of economic activity in the public interest”, which, in practice, considerably reduces the scope of such a defence.
The objective the Court assigns to the rights under Article 15, namely “to ensure the sustainability of the publishing industry and, consequently, to foster the availability of reliable information”[19], finds a direct echo in AI litigation. Protecting the rights of authors and holders of neighbouring rights does not serve a purely economic interest; it secures the conditions for creation and cultural diversity, values that the Union expressly recognises in Article 167 TFEU. The massive and unauthorised ingestion of protected works by AI models threatens those values by depriving creators of control over their works and of remuneration for their work.
Finally, it should be noted that the judgment confirms the pan-European scope of the harmonisation brought about by Directive 2019/790. The substantive content of the exclusive rights is uniform; AI system providers cannot rely on differences in transposition between Member States to claim a more lenient regime in any given country. It is the Court’s interpretation that prevails, and that interpretation places the rightholder’s prior consent at the heart of the framework.
The Meta judgment of 12 May 2026 is a landmark ruling. Delivered by the Grand Chamber of the Court, it sets, for the first time, the framework for interpreting Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 and lays the foundations for a law on the effectiveness of neighbouring rights in the digital environment. The Court refuses to confine exclusive rights to a legal abstraction with no grip on reality; it accepts that their effective implementation may require proportionate corrective mechanisms, adapted to the structural imbalance of the digital market.
For holders of copyright and neighbouring rights faced with the unauthorised use of their works by providers of artificial intelligence systems, this judgment is a considerable precedent. It confirms that EU law places prior consent at the heart of intellectual property protection in the digital environment; it recognises the legitimacy of binding mechanisms to correct the imbalance of power; it endorses a balancing of fundamental rights that favours creators. It remains to be seen whether the EU legislature or national legislatures will draw the consequences of this case law in order to regulate specifically the use of protected works for the purpose of training AI models.
[1]CJEU, Grand Chamber, 12 May 2026, Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd v Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, Case C‑797/23.
[2]Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market.
[3]Opinion of Advocate General M. Szpunar, delivered on 10 July 2025, Case C‑797/23, point 1.
[4]Paragraph 49 of the judgment; see also, as regards Article 2(c) of Directive 2001/29, CJEU, 29 July 2019, Pelham and Others, C‑476/17, paragraphs 84 to 86.
[5]Paragraphs 60 and 61 of the judgment.
[6]Paragraph 62 of the judgment: “Member States may not transpose Article 15 of Directive 2019/790 by replacing the exclusive rights of a preventive nature that it establishes with a mere right to compensation”.
[7]Paragraph 63 of the judgment.
[8]Paragraphs 64 and 65 of the judgment; see also recital 82 of Directive 2019/790.
[9]Paragraph 66 of the judgment.
[10]Paragraphs 53 and 72 of the judgment.
[11]Paragraph 77 of the judgment; Opinion of the Advocate General, points 46 and 47.
[12]Paragraph 78 of the judgment.
[13]Paragraphs 81 and 83 of the judgment.
[14]Paragraphs 96 to 97 of the judgment; CJEU, 22 January 2013, Sky Österreich, C‑283/11, paragraph 60.
[15]Paragraph 99 of the judgment.
[16]Article 4 of Directive 2019/790.
[17]Article 4(3) of Directive 2019/790.
[18]Opinion of the Advocate General, point 29: “Facebook is therefore a genuine autonomous content provider, whose specific feature is that the content is neither created nor purchased by it”.
[19]Paragraph 55 of the judgment; recitals 54 and 55 of Directive 2019/790.
