Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, announced on its blog that it has signed copyright agreements with six French magazines and newspapers, including Le Figaro and Le Monde.
These agreements follow months of negotiations between the tech giant, French news agencies and publishers, where they decided how to apply the EU’s updated copyright rules, which let publishers require a fee from online platforms that show news extracts.
Initially, the world’s largest search engine dismissed the idea of paying for content, arguing that Google brought the websites more online traffic. The agreements are based on various criteria, such as the publication’s daily volume, internet traffic and their contribution to general and political information, as well as how their content is used by Google.
Google says that they are in talks with other national and regional daily publications in France as well in addition to magazines. Their goal is to reach a larger agreement with the country’s print media industry by the end of the year. Google already has agreements with leading German publications.
This statement from Google follows a court ruling that ordered the tech company to start discussing payment for content with French publishers.