French Court To Rule If Google Can Be Forced Into “Neighboring Rights” With Press

According to a report from Euractiv, the Paris Court of Appeal will rule Thursday, October 8, on whether the country’s competition authority had the power to require Google to negotiate with the French press on so-called “neighboring rights,” which allow online newspaper publishers to be remunerated for publishing extracts of their articles on Google News.

What are neighbouring rights? This principle similar to copyright is designed to help newspaper and magazine publishers, as well as news agencies, receive payment from the world’s Internet giants when their content is being reused online.

It was established by Article 15 of the EU Copyright Directive, adopted by the European Parliament at the end of March 2019 after an intense lobbying battle, with the terms and conditions of use and prices still to be negotiated between press publishers and platforms.

France is the first EU member state to apply this reform after it swiftly transposed the directive into national law on July 24, 2019.

Why are the French press and Google in conflict? Google does not want to remunerate publishers for the extracts and thumbnails it includes on its search results page, arguing that this generates enormous traffic for publishers. According to the US giant, the traffic is sufficient to pay them.

The publishers, for their part, believe that Google itself became a content producer with its search results pages, which capture the user’s attention and can thus be monetized.

In November 2019, French publishers filed a complaint against the American giant before the French Competition Authority for abuse of dominant position.