According to reports, Google announced today that it has reached a new content copyright agreement with a French publishers association.
The publishers’ association includes nearly 300 French newspapers. The two sides said in a joint statement that the conclusion of the new agreement showed that the negotiations between the two sides had been successful.
Negotiations between Google and the French Publishers Association began last September to resolve a dispute between Google and publishers’ overpayment for news content.
In January of this year, the parties agreed on a copyright framework. The new agreement, signed today, lays out a series of terms that allow Google and members of the publishers association to negotiate their respective licensing agreements and compensation terms.
For years, news organizations’ ad revenue has been cannibalized by news aggregators like Google and Facebook. They complained that the tech companies were using their content in search results or other features without paying royalties.
Google, on the other hand, believes that its news search service only provides a very small part of the whole news, and interested readers will still click the link to the original page, which will bring traffic to news publishers.
Later, the revised European Copyright Directive was adopted, and France took the lead in implementing it. The new copyright law will force Google to pay publishers for news snippets, requiring Facebook to filter out protected content.