300 European media have just reached an agreement with Google on Wednesday May 11 to apply neighboring rights. This European directive was transposed in 2019 into the legislation of several European countries such as France, Germany or Hungary, and allows journalists to be paid for articles shared by platforms such as Google. The tech giant takes the opportunity to announce through his official blog the tool that will help him respect his agreements.
Respect for neighboring rights
Long awaited by the world of the press, this agreement had begun to take a more concrete form in March 2022. The Alliance of the press of general information (APIG) and Google had agreed on the implementation ” transparent and non-discriminatory criteria » within the framework of respect for neighboring rights. As a reminder, this law is taken from a European directive on copyright adopted in April 2019, which obliges platforms such as Google News or Facebook to remunerate the creators whose content they share.
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To apply neighboring rights, the company has signed an agreement with 300 media present in Germany, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland. The Californian company specifies that “ other discussions are ongoing » to add countries to the agreement.
While Google intends to follow the law, it wants to do so on its terms. With this in mind, he took advantage of the announcement of the agreement to present the tool that will govern the remuneration of the media and journalists. This is a platform called Extended News Previews (ENP), to which the media will have to register if they want to be paid by the American giant.
Google imposes certain conditions
As explained in the Google press release, ENP is the tool that will allow the media to access their rights. Once the agreement is signed via ENP, the media will be able to be remunerated when Google shares ” long extracts and thumbnails from the articles. Google recalls that ” the law creates a right for the media when a longer preview of the content is shared online, but without specifying the difference between long and short excerpt. »
The American firm also maintains the vagueness on the size of the extracts of which it does not specify the size criteria. It can therefore freely impose its own conditions on this point. It is important to remember that simple hypertext links are not affected by neighboring rights.
Regarding compensation, ENP description explains that payments will be made in equal monthly installments. Google does not publicly go into the details of the calculation of these monthly payments. He only explains that the remuneration depends on advertising revenue and the number of times the same news site appears in Google News. Media that do not register with ENP will still see their articles appear, but will not receive compensation.
Germany represents two-thirds of the 300 media that have signed the agreement. ENP will therefore first be launched in Germany and also in Hungary. We will have to wait a few more months to see it arrive in other European countries. Meta had taken the lead over Google with the launch of Facebook News in France in February. It remains to be seen whether the remuneration will live up to the expectations of publishers for the two platforms.