Paris (AFP)
Facebook does not expect to pay French press publishers for the "enriched" links shared on its platform, said Friday the social network, which says it wants to launch soon a space dedicated to news in France.
To comply with the law of July 24 - transposition of the European Directive on copyright and neighboring rights - entered into force on Thursday, the Californian group will ask "the permission of the press publishers to post on [ its] platforms online, in an enriched format, links to their content, "said a blog post by Jesper Doub, director of partnerships News in Europe, Middle East and Africa at Facebook.
This new law, which has become a bone of contention between the French press and the Google search giant, should allow newspaper publishers to negotiate with the digital giants (who capture the bulk of online advertising revenue) a remuneration for the reuse of their content on the web.
According to Facebook's reasoning, publishers already give their consent when they publish their own content on the social network. For links to articles shared by users - "a very small part of the content" according to Facebook who did not wish to be more precise - the press publishers will be able to agree to the display of enriched links, without remuneration to the key.
For publishers who do not agree, links that may include today a title, an excerpt of text, the mention of the author, images or a video clip can only be displayed as a hyperlink and a title says Facebook on a page dedicated to publishers.
However, unlike Google, the agreement -revocable- will be given for all articles of the same editor and not for each article independently, said Facebook.
Parallel to this announcement, the social network says it has made France a "priority" for the expansion of its tab dedicated to Facebook News, to be launched this Friday in the United States. According to the article by Jesper Doub, "discussions" are under way "with French publishers to set up a dedicated space on Facebook for news content, via selected editors who could be paid.
"Our discussions with French publishers to define what the best experience would look like and how we could compensate our partners appropriately, are already underway and will continue," he said.
© 2019 AFP