On Wednesday, the Paris Commercial Court ordered the search engine Google to give up a project to make invisible certain media articles with which it has a dispute over neighboring rights. The matter had been referred to the courts via an emergency procedure by the Syndicat des éditeurs de la presse magazine (SEPM), which had learned that Google was planning to test this pressure tactic as of Thursday.

Both parties are in negotiations for several years on the subject of neighboring rights to copyright, instituted for digital platforms by a 2019 European directive. These rights enable newspapers, magazines or news agencies to be remunerated when their content is reused by digital giants – in this case, article headlines and excerpts, in Google search results or on the Google News portal.

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Google “very surprised

The court ordered Google LLC, a U.S. company, Google Ireland and Google France to “not to proceed with the test”.under penalty of “300,000 euros per day each”.900,000 euros in total, according to a decision consulted by AFP. The case is to be decided at a later date by an interim relief judge. “The SEPM is delighted with this result, which safeguards the interests of the French press as a whole, and will be keeping a close eye on developments in this case before the interim relief judge and the French Competition Authority”.said the trade organization, which groups 80 companies representing 500 print and 200 online titles, in a press release.

“We are very surprised by the SEPM’s position”.Google reacted in a press release. The American giant believes that it sought to collect data from a limited number of Internet users because “independent administrative authorities and press publishers have asked us for more information about the impact of displaying news content in our search engine.”.

In March, Google received a 250 million euro fine from the French competition authority, which criticized the company for failing to respect certain commitments made in 2022 in this matter. The Alphabet Group subsidiary is not alone in its disputes with the French media on this subject. Accused of bad faith in its negotiations, X (formerly Twitter) was taken to court in November by newspapers such as Le Monde, Le Figaro or Le Parisienand by Agence France-Presse.