These agreements do not come out of nowhere. In 2009, the Hadopi law established a first legal framework for the sharing of value between journalists and publishers of press titles. All the major groups then made agreements with the unions, still in force today, which allow an annual payment for all journalists. In 2019, a text on neighboring rights was adopted at European level, in order to fairly compensate the exploitation by search engines and aggregators of article content. This was done painfully, with very heavy sentences from the competition authority targeting Google in particular.
The agreements made with OpenAI constitute the third stage of this rocket, since they provide, again, remuneration (in January 2024, the media The Information mentioned sums of between 1 and 5 million dollars per year and per media, editor’s note) in exchange for exploiting the content of articles to feed the AI. The formula is intelligent, it’s “win-win”. In any case, the world of the press didn’t have much of a choice: even if it meant being pressured by the AI giants, it would also benefit from significant remuneration.
It should also be noted that the legal proceedings launched by the New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI are part of the same philosophy: even if it does not use the same means, this media also aims to achieve monetization commensurate with the damage that he believes he is suffering. For me, these agreements therefore correspond to an intelligent consideration of the respective interests of two parties, in a spirit of pragmatism.
Morocco
