Franco-German Front to ensure respect for neighboring rights

Failing to impose them again on digital players, including Google, which has just appealed against the decision in April of the Competition Authority obliging it to negotiate "in good faith" with press editors the conditions of their remuneration , neighboring rights are making their way in Europe. On Thursday, the two main press publishers' organizations in France and Germany, the Alliance of General Information Press (Apig) and VG Media, announced that they would jointly create a new collecting society. This will be responsible for negotiating the amount of neighboring rights with digital platforms.

Established in 2019 by a European directive on copyright, neighboring rights should allow publishers of online sites to be remunerated for the recovery by Google, Facebook or Twitter of content - such as articles, photos, etc. . - that they produce, and which ultimately benefit the platforms in terms of audience. The challenge: that the value created online is fairly shared with publishers. And it was France, a year ago, which was the first country to transpose this directive by adopting the law of July 24, 2019.

Company open to all European publishers

To ensure the effectiveness of this right in Europe and create a one-stop-shop for platforms for their use of the online press, the General Information Press Alliance and VG Media are setting up this new collecting society which has vocation to be open to all European press publishers.

The General Information Press Alliance represents 300 news newspapers in France (national daily press - such as Le Figaro - , regional daily press, regional weekly press). VG Media is a licensing company that brings together 222 companies holding publishing, television, radio and press rights including ProSiebenSat.1 or the publisher Axel Springer.