News/Media Alliance Executive Vice President & General Counsel Danielle Coffey shared with Editor & Publisher Magazine ways news publishers can navigate complex copyright compliance issues.
On October 21, Facebook reached an agreement with a group of French publishers to pay for news on its platform in France.
In early June, the French competition authority, Autorité de la concurrence, announced that Google had reached an agreement with the authority to settle an antitrust investigation regarding the tech giant’s anticompetitive behavior in the market for online advertising services.
Much of the news business is being hammered by the decline in advertising because of Covid-19, just when the public most needs reliable information. But in the midst of this crisis, something very good just happened for journalism: French antitrust authorities ordered Google to negotiate with publishers to pay for the news content shown in search results. It is the first time that a major digital platform has been required to pay for news anywhere.
For years, critics have attempted to make the case for why the EU should not adopt a similar copyright law. And for years, we’ve heard otherwise from our European colleagues. To better understand the impact of the closure of Google News in Spain, we recently spoke with our European colleagues and reviewed publicly available website data.
The News Media Alliance strongly condemns Google’s announcement that, under the newly adopted European Union Copyright Directive, it will stop displaying previews of news articles in France unless a publisher waives its right to compensation.
