Google will pay the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) for the content. Google announced on Wednesday that it had signed a five-year agreement with the agency. It is one of the largest licensing agreements under the new French law, Reuters reported. Google declined to disclose the financial terms of the agreement.
AFP and Google said in a joint press release that they would also work together on projects such as fact-finding. “This agreement is a recognition of the value of information,” said AFP Director Fabrice Fries.
Reuters previously wrote that Google agreed earlier this year to pay $ 76 million (CZK 1.7 billion) to a group of 121 French news publishers over a three-year period. But AFP was not part of the agreement. The agreement is postponed pending the outcome of an antitrust proceeding in which the French competition authority accused Google of failing to act in good faith.
News companies have long been losing advertising revenue to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook. In addition, journalists have been complaining for years that these companies use the content they create without paying for it. Only new laws passed in France and Australia have given them more bargaining power, allowing publishers to sign billions of dollars in collective licensing agreements.
The new agreement does not include AFP in the News Showcase, a feature that Google launched last year that promotes content from more than 1,000 publishers who have agreed to license their content for a fee. The agreement with Google was signed by Reuters in January. Last month, Facebook signed a copyright agreement with the Alliance de la presse d’information générale (Apig), which represents some French news publishers, including Le Figaro.
Czech publishers of newspapers, magazines and internet content providers called on the Czech Republic’s representatives in the Council of the EU not to adopt the draft European regulation “Digital Markets Act”. According to them, the regulation in its current form contains fundamental shortcomings, due to which it rather protects large Internet companies, such as Google or Facebook, ie the so-called gatekeepers, against whom the regulation was originally aimed.