France is the first country to transpose part of the European Copyright Directive. It remains to find common ground between the various news sites and GAFAM.
Parliament on Tuesday finally adopted the draft law on neighboring rights for publishers and news agencies, with 81 votes in favor, and one vote against. This text makes it possible to transpose part of the European directive on copyright, a text voted at the end of March by MEPs after months of discussion and controversy.
Fair and equitable compensation from platforms like Google News
The neighboring law will rebalance the balance of power between the newspaper publishers and GAFAM, which reproduce most of the articles published on their own platforms, without paying a single cent of remuneration to the media.
Google, Facebook or Apple will now be obliged to negotiate individual agreements with each press title, according to their human and financial resources, but also their importance in the democratic debate.
The game is far from won, however, both GAFAM are reluctant to pay for the articles published by the many news sites.
A text that could favor major press groups at the expense of small news sites
Publishers must also organize and agree among themselves, as explained Pierre Louette, CEO of the group Les Echos-Le Parisien and charged with a specific mission on neighboring rights within the Alliance of the general information press : " We must identify the basis of these rights, which publishers can claim the neighboring right, determine a rate of remuneration and a collection agency ".
The websites are also suspicious of the implementation of neighboring law and fear that the discussions are in favor of some well-established publishers, to the detriment of smaller news sites for which Facebook or Google would not bother with multiple and tedious negotiations.
" The contents of the press are not key to the platforms, and they are not ready to pay silly, or even unwilling to pay to have them, and they can find, with publishers, individual agreements that will benefit everyone , "says Echos Giuseppe de Martino, president of the Community Internet Services Association .
In the worst-case scenario, this text could mean the valorization of only several big names in the national press and the end of the plurality of the independent press on popular platforms like Google News.
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