French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) launched a copyright case on Tuesday against social media giant X, formerly known as Twitter, in an effort to secure financial compensation for use of its content on the platform.
AFP said in a Tuesday press release that it applied to Paris court for interim measures: “This move is aimed at compelling Twitter, in accordance with the law, to provide all the necessary elements required for assessing the remuneration owed to AFP under the neighbouring rights legislation.”
Media groups and publishers have long argued that their content brings additional value to social media platforms and that they should, therefore, be compensated. In 2019, the European Union agreed to their demands and expanded its intellectual property rules to include so-called neighboring rights. Specifically, the provision that allows publishers and news outlets to seek compensation from social media platforms when their users share for instance photos or excerpts from articles.
AFP said its earlier requests for financial compensation had been ignored by Twitter.
The outlet “has expressed its concerns over the clear refusal from Twitter (recently rebranded as ‘X’) to enter into discussions regarding the implementation of neighbouring rights for the press,” the press release continued.
AFP is not the first French media to demand compensation from the platform. In July, three other French media groups (Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Les Échos-Le Parisien) had already taken it to court for similar reasons.
“This is bizarre,” X owner Elon Musk posted today in response to AFP’s court case. “They want us to pay *them* for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t!?”
Meta and Google also have used similar arguments when lobbying against a similar publisher compensation law in Australia, claiming that the tech platforms already help news outlets by driving traffic to their news sites and that they are the ones helping people find the news content in the first place.
Google at one point threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australian territory, but later caved. Initially, Australian news became unavailable on Facebook, but the company has since struck a deal with several Australian news outlets.
In Canada, Meta began blocking news content on its Facebook and Instagram platforms this week over the Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18. The company called the new publisher payment law a “fundamentally flawed legislation that ignores the realities of how our platforms work.”
Google has threatened to remove all links to Canadian news outlets from its Search, News, and Discover products, and shut down its Google News Showcase for all Canadian users. In response, the Canadian government said it would legislate financial caps on the compensation for tech companies.
Meanwhile, AFP is determined to continue the fight for the use of its content on social media.
According to French media, AFP will be requesting compensation from Facebook very soon, while negotiations with other platforms such as LinkedIn and TikTok have already been entrusted to a dedicated press organization responsible for collecting and distributing the sums obtained via neighboring rights among its members.
“The Agency will continue to employ the appropriate legal means with each relevant platform to ensure the fair distribution of the value generated by the sharing of news content,” AFP said.
