French justice intervenes against Google over neighboring rights

Photo: Cole Burston The Canadian Press In March, Google was fined €250 million by the French Competition Authority.

Agence France-Presse in Paris

Published yesterday at 3:30 PM Updated yesterday at 7:02 PM

• Europe

The Paris commercial court on Wednesday ordered the Google search engine to abandon a project to make invisible certain media articles with which it has a dispute over neighboring rights.

The court had been seized, via an emergency procedure, by the Syndicate of Magazine Press Publishers (SEPM), which had learned that Google was planning to test this pressure tactic starting Thursday.

For Google, this is “a time-limited experiment” to “assess the influence of displaying content from European press publishers on our users’ search experience and on the traffic that Google sends to publishers.”

The two parties have been negotiating for several years on the subject of rights related to copyright, established for digital platforms by a European directive in 2019.

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These rights allow newspapers, magazines or press agencies to be paid when their content is reused by digital giants — in this case the titles and excerpts of articles, in search results on Google or on the Google News portal.

The court ordered Google LLC, a US company, Google Ireland and Google France “not to proceed with the test” or face a “penalty payment of €300,000 [around $443,553] per day each”, or €900,000 ($1,330,672) in total, according to a decision seen by AFP.

The case is to be decided at a later date by a summary proceedings judge.

“The SEPM welcomes this result, which protects the interests of the entire French press, and will be closely monitoring developments in this case before the summary proceedings judge and the Competition Authority,” the professional organisation, which brings together 80 companies, including 500 paper titles and 200 online, said in a statement. line.

“We are very surprised by the position of the SEPM, while they themselves asked us for this data in writing,” Google responded in a press release.

The American giant believes that it sought to collect data from a limited number of Internet users because “independent administrative authorities and press publishers have asked us for more information about the impact of displaying news content in our search engine.”

In March, Google was fined €250 million by the French Competition Authority, which accused it of not having respected some of the commitments made in 2022 in this matter.

The Alphabet group subsidiary is not alone in having disagreements with the French media on this subject.

Accused of bad faith in its negotiations, X was sued this November by newspapers such as Le World, Le Figaro or Le Parisien, and by Agence France-Presse.

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