French justice intervenes against Google

The Paris commercial court ordered, on Wednesday November 13, the Google search engine to abandon its plan to make certain media articles with which it has a dispute concerning neighboring rights invisible.

Justice had been taken, through an emergency procedure, by the Union of Magazine Press Editors (SEPM), which had learned that Google was planning to test this means of pressure starting on Thursday.

According to Google, this is“an experiment limited in time” pour “evaluate the influence of the display of content from European press publishers on the search experience of our users and on the traffic that Google sends to publishers”.

The two parties have been in negotiations for several years regarding rights related to copyright, established for digital platforms by a 2019 European directive.

Penalty of 900,000 euros per day

These rights allow newspapers, magazines or press agencies to be remunerated when their content is reused by large digital groups – in this case the titles and extracts of articles, in search results on Google or on the portal Google News.

The court ordered Google LLC, an American company, Google Ireland and Google France “not to carry out the test”under penalty of “penalty of 300,000 euros per day each”or 900,000 euros in total, according to a decision consulted by Agence France-Presse.

The case must be decided at a later date by a judge in summary proceedings.

“The SEPM is delighted with this result which preserves the interests of the entire French press and will be very attentive to the developments of this case before the summary judge and before the Competition Authority”indicated in a press release the professional organization, which brings together 80 companies, i.e. 500 paper titles and 200 online.

“Very surprised”

“We are very surprised by the position of the SEPM, even though it itself asked us for this data in writing”reacted Google in a press release.

The company claims to have sought to collect data from a limited number of Internet users, because “independent administrative authorities and press publishers have asked us for more information on the impact of displaying news content in our search engine”.

In March, Google received a fine of 250 million euros from the French Competition Authority, which accused it of not having respected some of the commitments made in 2022 in this case.

The subsidiary of the Alphabet group is not the only one to have disputes with the French media on this subject. Accused of bad faith in its negotiations, the social network The World, Le Figaro or The Parisianas well as by Agence France-Presse.