Google agrees to pay French publishers

Google and French publishers have agreed on common criteria for remuneration, bringing to an end a long-running copyright dispute, the two parties said on Thursday.

The change will affect the way Google in future remunerates publishers for reproducing excerpts from their content.

Google will in future use the newly agreed guidelines as a basis for individual contracts with publishers, according to a statement by Google and publishers association L’Alliance de la Presse d’Information General.

Remuneration should depend, for example, on the daily volume of content published and a publications’ number of monthly unique visitors.

Publishing association head, Pierre Louette, spoke of an important step, while France’s Google boss Sebastien Missoffe said the agreement would open new perspectives for the media partners.

News agencies and media from the magazine press union are not included in the agreement, according to French news agency AFP.

The background to the dispute is an EU amendment passed in 2019 aimed at updating the bloc’s outdated copyright law for the digital age and ensuring authors receive better remuneration for content published online.

Google initially refused to pay for republished content, but suffered a defeat at the Paris Court of Appeal in October.

(dpa/NAN)