Referral C-806/26 (Manchester United Fanatics Klub, 20 Jul 2026)

1. Must Article 15(1) of 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 and amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC, read together with Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society, be interpreted as meaning that making available to the public is considered to occur when a chatbot based on a large language model (LLM) operated by an information society service provider, in response to a request by the user (prompt), displays synthesised textual content, or a summary, that did not exist previously, on the basis of which the original press publication may be deduced and the content on which it is based may be recognised?

2. Must Article 15(1) of Directive 2019/790, and, in accordance with it, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29, be interpreted as meaning that the process of training an LLM-based chatbot constitutes an act of reproduction if, during that process, the content of a copyright-protected press publication is broken down into numerical tokens and statistical relationships which do not store the original content, but rather solely linguistic relationships?

3. Must Article 15(1) of Directive 2019/790, and, in accordance with it, Article 2 of Directive 2001/29, be interpreted as meaning that an act of reproduction of a copyright-protected press publication is considered to occur when the user gives an LLM-based chatbot an instruction containing a copyright-protected press publication and the chatbot processes that instruction in the context of the conversation, in order to be able to give a useful response to the user's question?

4. If the answer to the second question is in the affirmative, does such reproduction of copyright-protected press publications fall within the scope of the exception for the purposes of text and data mining provided for in Article 4 of Directive 2019/790 when the trained LLM is subsequently used to power a chatbot capable of generating useful responses based on users' instructions?

5. Must Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29, read together with Article 15(1) of Directive 2019/790, be interpreted as meaning that the press publisher has consented to the use of a copyright-protected press publication for the purposes of the functioning of an LLM-based chatbot service – including its training and, in that context, the tokenisation of [the publication's] content, as well as the process of grounding in order to obtain the up-to-date and factual information needed to respond to the users' questions – when it has not expressly prohibited its use on the online platform operated by the service provider?

6. Must Article 4(3) of Directive 2019/790 be interpreted as meaning that, if a press publisher does not expressly and appropriately assert its right of exclusion, it is then considered to have authorised the use of the press publication for the purposes of the functioning of an LLM-based chatbot?