Copyright: Agreement reached between Google and French AFP

After a long dispute, Google and AFP (Agence France-Presse) finally seem to have reached an amicable agreement. The content of the dispute was the alleged infringement of ancillary copyright by the search engine giant. Now Google and the French news agency seem to have reached an agreement on rules of remuneration.

Copyright infringement in focus

The lynchpin of the long-running dispute between the two was copyright infringement on the part of Google, which was in the spotlight. The AFP had denounced this several times in recent months. AFP is now said to be entitled to remuneration from Google for the corresponding ancillary copyrights. As it is so provided in the French law, the news agency is entitled to this for the next five years.

Agreement at last

Surely both the search engine giant and the conglomerate of various French news services will now make at least three crosses. After all, the dispute was not only time-consuming and nerve-wracking for both sides. It can also be assumed that it was an expensive dispute. This did not take place in a court of law. Rather, an amicable settlement was reached. The two parties acted on the basis of the French competition authority.

The head of AFP, Fabrice Fries, naturally expressed his delight that the content “stolen” by Google is now finally being recognized as valuable information. A similarly positive sign also came from the French Google boss Sébastien Missoffe. He wants to use the content of the agreement to reaffirm that it is important for Google to come to an agreement with both news agencies and important publishers in France. However, it is probably safe to assume that the company would have preferred to get away with less financially.

Criteria already set in January

How the remuneration of contents is to proceed exactly, both parties have already specified according to own data in January this year. Here it was decided that the search engine giant from the USA has to take care of the negotiation of individual contracts. How high the respective remuneration for the use of third-party content will ultimately be depends on various factors. In particular, parameters such as the number of users of a news service or the number of articles published daily play a role. But what exactly does Google have to pay for? The AFP was incensed by the fact that the search engine made information visible in its results quasi free of charge, which was not just mere links or short paragraphs.

In the end, users didn’t even get to the news page anymore, but gathered the most important info in Google’s summary. With the amendment of the European copyright law, which came into force in 2019, exactly these scenarios were also finally transferred to the outdated copyright law of our climes. Digital performance rights were treated rather stepmotherly until then. Google originally fought the demanded payments in court. However, after the competent court of appeal in Paris ruled in favor of AFP, the Californian Internet company had no choice but to surrender to the payment for performance rights. A correct and important sign also for other publishers and agencies operating in Europe.