France’s Regulator Orders Google To Pay For News Reuse

France’s competition authority has ordered Google to negotiate with publishers to pay for reuse of snippets of their content, such as can be displayed in its News aggregation service or surfaced via Google Search.

According to Tech Crunch, the country was the first of the European Union Member States to transpose the neighboring right for news into national law, following the passing of a pan-EU copyright reform last year.

Among various controversial measures the reform included a provision to extend copyright to cover content such as the ledes of news stories which aggregators such as Google News scrape and display. The copyright reform as a whole was voted through the EU parliament in March 2019, while France’s national law for extended press publishers rights came into force in October 2019.

A handful of individual EU Member States, including Germany and Spain, had previously passed similar laws covering the use of news snippets, without successfully managing to extract payments from Google, as lawmakers had hoped.

In Spain, for example, which made payments to publishers mandatory, Google instead chose to pull the plug on its Google News service entirely. But publishers who lobbied for a pan-EU reform hoped a wider push could turn the screw on the tech giant.

Full Content: Autorite de la Concurrence

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