Three of France's biggest newspaper groups are seeking to force Twitter to appear in court over licencing fees they say the social media site owes for publishing their content. While Facebook and Google have reached agreements with French publishers, Twitter has so far refused to negotiate.
The groups that publish the French dailies Le Figaro, Le Parisien, Les Echos and Le Monde, as well as several magazines and news websites, have asked judges in Paris to summon representatives from Twitter and its French subsidiary, they said in a statement on Tuesday.
The dispute involves so-called neighbouring rights: a form of copyright protection that extends to the performers, producers or broadcasters of copyrighted material, not only its original author. Under an EU directive of 2019, now part of French law, the concept allows news publishers to claim remuneration for any reproduction of their content in digital form.
Despite repeated requests, neither Twitter France nor Twitter International Unlimited Company has agreed to negotiate over licencing fees, the news groups said in their statement.
They're hoping the court can force the companies to provide the data they need to calculate the sum due.
Potential fine
"They must have identified news articles being used, and what they want to find out is how much and to what extent they've been used so that they can establish the amount of remuneration that Twitter would owe them if it were to respect neighbouring rights," explains Vanessa Bouchara, a lawyer who specialises in intellectual property.
Twitter "risks being forbidden from using the articles in question and above all a financial penalty", she told RFI.
While it's hard to say how much the company could be forced to pay, in 2021 France's competition regulator fined Google €500 million for failing to negotiate as instructed with media companies over the use of their content. It was the biggest such fine ever imposed on a company.
But as Bouchara points out: "You can't compare Twitter to Google, because Google is to go-to search engine and the use of Twitter certainly isn't on the same level."
Nonetheless, she estimates that Twitter could be facing a fine of "several million euros" if regulators ultimately ruled against it.
French news publishers will be hoping that threat is enough to bring the company to the negotiating table.
France was the first country in the EU to incorporate the copyright directive into national law. Google initially refused to comply, saying media groups already benefited by receiving millions of visits to their websites via its search results, but ultimately signed licence deals with a number of French newspapers and news agencies.
