Google is not only obliged to negotiate agreements with press publishers to link news in its search engine, it must also ask permission to train its large artificial intelligence language models based on news from the media. These are two reasons that the Competition Authority (ADLC) of France has indicated for imposing a new fine of 250 million euros on Google for violations of EU intellectual property rules.
The French regulator has pointed out that Google has not respected a previous commitment to negotiate agreements in good faith with the press publishers of that country and that it has trained its AI model that is expressed through the Bard chatbot – now Gemini – with content from the media without notifying the Competition Authority or French publishers. The American technology company was forced to negotiate with French publishers by a court that upheld in 2020 an order requiring it to pay a European Union copyright directive from the previous year.
In a statement published on its blog, Google has indicated that it will not challenge the sanction: “we have compromised because the time has come to turn the page and, as demonstrated by our numerous agreements with publishers, we want to focus on long-term approaches to connect Internet users with quality content and working constructively with French editors. In any case, the search engine company considers that “the amount of the fine is disproportionate in relation to the violations detected.”
Google considers that the ADLC “does not take sufficient account of the efforts” it has made to address its observations “in an environment in which it is very difficult to define a course of action when a precise direction cannot be anticipated.” He explains that “the absence of clear regulatory measures and successive legal actions have made negotiations with publishers more complex and have prevented us from calmly considering our future investments in the information field in France.”
The Californian company assures that it has reached “important licensing agreements for related rights with 280 French press publishers – covering more than 450 publications – and who pay several tens of millions of euros per year.” Google had already been fined 500 million euros by the ADLC for similar reasons. In December 2014, Spain became the first country in the world in which Google closed Google News due to the entry into force of the Intellectual Property Law, which contemplated the right of news publishers to receive inalienable financial compensation for part of the news aggregators that will index their information.
