Paris (AFP)
Google will not pay European press publishers in France to display excerpts from their articles, photos and videos, but will no longer show them in its results without their agreement, announced Wednesday a group leader.
The US digital giant has announced the new rules for France that will apply next month, pursuant to a law passed this summer, which transposes into French law the European directive on copyright.
This law establishes a "neighboring right" for the benefit of press publishers and agencies, including AFP, a measure supposed to help them to pay for the recovery of their content on online platforms and other aggregators, and who had made the an intense lobbying battle in Brussels, pitting media companies against GAFA.
Under this law, Richard Gingras, vice president of Google in charge of information, presented Wednesday these new rules to the press.
Press editors based in Europe will now have to decide individually whether, in France, excerpts of their news (texts, videos ...), or "snippets", and other thumbnails will continue to appear side of links to their sites. And this, both in the search results and in Google News.
For publishers who accept, these excerpts will be displayed without being paid by Google.
If they refuse, these snippets and other mini-images will no longer be displayed in the search engine results, which will only include a title and a link to the news of the publishers concerned. But the news of these media will continue to be referenced, assured Google, even if these publishers of press may see traffic to their sites decrease or fall.
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