Google argued that it was only summarising other people’s pages, the same defence that has long protected search engines in Germany. The court disagreed. AI Overviews, it said, do not just show links but make “independent, new and substantive statements” built by evaluating and combining third-party sites, so Google must treat them as its own, including as the provider of an AI system under the EU’s AI Act. “Only it has influence over the AI,” the judges wrote. It doesn’t summarize, to summarize something you first need to understand what it says and even what it means. AI in it’s current form doesn’t understand the meaning of anything, just the statistical chance of what the next word should be. Al it’s doing is paraphrasing, shuffling words around just enough to claim it doesn’t owe the original writer anything. Most of us learned why that was unacceptable in jr high English; it’s plagiarism if done correctly and nonsense if not. Google and other AI corps want to play it both ways, they want to reuse information for free while not being accountable for what it says. If they’re not accountable because it’s not their information, why aren’t they paying the people who created the information?