On Tuesday, the biggest news agencies of Europe accused Google and Facebook of stealing news for free and sought for more details disclosure about their revenues with the media, a joint statement said.
Around 20 agencies represented by their respective CEOs signed a column which included Agence France-Presse from France, Press Association from Britain and Deutsche Presse-Agentur from Germany and they called on the European Parliament to update copyright law for the EU to stop such malpractice.
“The Internet giants’ plundering of the news media’s content and of their advertising revenue poses a threat both to consumers and to democracy,” the column said.
This month, the lawmakers of European Parliament are slated to debate a new copyright law that would pressurize the Internet giant Duo to pay more for creative content used on their online platforms dedicated for news, music or movies.
The first draft of the law saw rejection in the month of July and the plans were strictly opposed by US tech firms along with campaigners for internet freedom who are of the view that such regulations could lead to higher costs for consumers.
“Can the titans of the Internet compensate the media without asking people to pay for access to the Internet, as they claim they would be forced to? The answer is clearly ‘yes’,” the column said.
According to the joint statement from the big media houses, Facebook disclosed its revenues as USD 40 billion in the year 2017 and total profits of USD 16 billion and Google disclosed USD 12.7 billion on sales of USD 110 billion. All of these media agencies are the biggest supplies of news, videos, and photos.
“Who could reasonably argue that they are not in a position to make fair payment for the content they use?” the agencies asked.
“What we are really talking about is introducing a fair payment by those who have ripped off the news. For the sake of Europe’s free press and democratic values, EU lawmakers should press ahead with copyright reform,” they added.
The publishing of the column with signatures seems to be a new attempt by media groups to reign in European lawmakers for their second vote on September 12. The column is also supported by artists such as Paul McCartney.
There are many parts to the planned law and this fight is regarding two parts of it.
The first one for which there is a struggle by agencies is the Article 13, which would bring platforms like Youtube legally liable for using copyrighted material to avoid paying for its own content producers for their work.
The second, Article 11, deals with issues like the so-called “neighboring right”, that means for every news being used by the companies from source agencies, the former will have to pay the latter for it.
“Without paying for it, Internet giants such as Google and Facebook use vast quantities of news that is produced at great cost by press publishers and news agencies,” added the joint statement issued by them on Tuesday.
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