Google has been fined by French regulators for breaching an agreement on paying media companies for the reproduction of their content online by their AI. This comes after Google failed to honour an agreement made in 2022 by failing to properly credit and pay news media publishers.
The French competition watchdog expressed concerns over Google’s AI-powered chatbot Bard (now rebranded as Gemini) being trained on content from publishers and news agencies without notifying them. They fined Google for “failing to respect commitments made in 2022” and accused Google of not negotiating in “good faith” with news publishers on how to compensate them for use of their content. Google and other online media platforms have been accused of profiting from other media outlets work without sharing a part of the revenue.
To help combat this, the EU has created a form of copyright called ‘neighbouring rights’ that allows print media to demand compensation for the use of their content. In 2019, France became the first EU country to require large tech platforms to open talks with publishers seeking compensation for use of their news content. After resistance, Google and Facebook both agreed to pay French media for articles shown in web searches. The latest fine comes from a copyright dispute over online content triggered by complaints from some of France’s biggest news organisations in 2019. French regulators accepted commitments from Google to negotiate fairly with news organisations in 2022. Under the agreement, Google has to provide a transparent offer of payment within three months of receiving a copyright complaint. Google dropped its appeal against an initial €500m fine issued at the end of an investigation carried out by the French competition watchdog.
Google has since violated four out of seven commitments agreed in the 2022 settlement. The watchdog said, “Subsequently, Google linked the use of the content concerned by its artificial intelligence service to the display of protected content”. Many publishers and writers are seeking to limit the automatic data collection AI services can access their content without consent or fair compensation. This case is an important milestone for AI intellectual property laws as AI becomes increasingly more developed. With this decision in France, we could see these laws being enforced throughout the EU and other countries.
Google said: “Google is the first and only platform to have signed a significant number of licensing agreements with 280 French news publishers under the European copyright directive. These cover more than 450 of their publications – and pay publishers tens of millions of euros a year. Despite this progress, the French competition authority today imposed a €250m fine on Google for how we have conducted those negotiations. They also insisted on changes to how we negotiate, which we have agreed to as part of a settlement of a long-running case.”
“We’ve settled because it’s time to move on and, as our many agreements with publishers show, we want to focus on the larger goal of sustainable approaches to connecting people with quality content and on working constructively with French publishers. But it’s important to note that the fine is not proportionate to issues raised by the French competition authority. It also doesn’t sufficiently take into account the efforts we have made to answer and resolve the concerns raised – in an environment where it’s very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next.”
