Qwant could pay about a million euros to the press publishers in 2019, as part of the consultation of their articles on the French search engine.

The French independent search engine Qwant, "waits for the RIBs of press publishers" to pay them, says his boss Éric Léandri, who also proposes to create a decentralized system to easily check who owns the photos published online. In an interview with AFP, the co-founder and president of Qwant takes a stand on the best way, according to him, to apply the European reform on copyright, adopted at the end of March by MEPs.

One million euros for the press in 2019

This directive, which Member States will have to transpose into their national law within two years of publication in the EU Official Journal, provides for the creation of a "neighboring right" in copyright for the press, so that platforms (Google News, Facebook) better pay the media for the items they use. "We started to implement the payment of the press before the vote," said Éric Léandri, for whom the news "makes the search engine alive." "Without the news, our web results are much less relevant," he notes.

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Qwant intends to apply the same agreement as that with VG Media, the association of press publishers in Germany: 5% of "web and news" revenues are donated to the media concerned. In France, he hopes that the press will organize in the same way, but in the meantime "we will send checks to those who send us their RIB", starting with the magazine Le Point , which has already run. Qwant could thus pay about one million euros to the publishers of press in 2019, if its results are at the height of its forecasts.

"If Google applies the same thing, it will have 150 to 200 million per year to the French press," says Éric Léandri. Since 2015, as part of its "Digital News Initiative" (DNI or Initiative for Digital Journalism), Google allocates funds to selected press titles during annual calls for projects, including on "diversification of sources of income ". In March, its media fund has redistributed a total of 25.6 million euros in Europe, including nearly 6.6 million euros in France.

A "basket" to authenticate the contents

Éric Léandri also intends to take advantage of the European reform to propose a solution that meets the current challenges of intellectual property remuneration. Qwant has created a digital and decentralized "basket", which is intended to be used by content owners (photos, texts, videos, music ...), to "drop" them, and by sites that publish content, for authenticate at the time of publication. "Neither the giants of the web nor anybody will be able to say: 'we could not verify to whom such photo belonged'", assures the boss of the search engine.

This solution, which it plans to make available to stakeholders soon, is opposed to filter technologies, such as "Content ID" Google, used on its subsidiary YouTube to recognize videos and identify copyright infringement . Proponents of Internet freedom associate these filters with some form of censorship. "We want to reverse the problem: instead of putting filters on sites, we give a place where we can verify that it does not belong to anyone else," argues Éric Léandri, who says he wants to avoid "total control of web by the major platforms ".