A number of prominent French newspapers have declared their intention to take legal action against social media platform X for freely distributing their content.
The collective lawsuit, spearheaded by Le Figaro, Les Echos, Le Parisien, Le Monde, Telerama, Courier International, Huffington Post, Malsherbes, and Nouvel Obs, accuses the platform, previously known as Twitter, of violating “neighboring rights” mandated under a European directive adopted into French law.
The newspapers and Agence France-Presse (AFP) had previously sought an emergency injunction against Company X due to a lack of negotiations.
The Paris Tribunal has granted media companies two months to provide commercial data to evaluate the revenue earned from their content by X.
In their statement, the newspapers criticized X for failing to comply with the court’s decision and showing a continued disregard for legal obligations.
France has been at the forefront of efforts to protect publishing rights and media revenues from tech giants that share and display news content without compensation.
To address this issue, the EU introduced neighboring rights to allow news media to claim compensation for the use of their content.
France’s implementation of the neighboring rights directive has made it a test case for EU regulations, with major tech companies like Google and Facebook eventually agreeing to pay French media outlets for displaying their articles in search results.
A lawyer for X argued that the social network, based on user-generated content rather than published content, is not subject to the Neighboring Rights Directive, unlike Google and Facebook.
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In a controversial post last year, X commented on the AFP incident, questioning the demand for payment from them for traffic redirected to their sites where they earn ad revenue.
Attempts to reach X for comment have been made.
Source: www.theguardian.com
