Report from Courthouse News
In Brief – The Court of Justice of the European Union has upheld Italy’s forced media payments regime for the largest digital platforms, rejecting Meta’s challenge to national rules requiring tech platforms to negotiate compensation with news publishers for online use of journalism. Following the EU 2019 copyright reform, Italy adopted one of the EU’s most aggressive systems to press Google and Meta to compensate Italian media companies when snippets of their content appeared on the platforms. Italy’s communications regulator was empowered to demand traffic and advertising data from the platforms, oversee negotiations, and penalize platforms that refused to cooperate. Meta argued the EU directive created only limited copyright protections for publishers and did not authorize regulator-backed negotiations and fines. The court ruled that member states may create regulatory mechanisms ensuring publishers’ rights function effectively in practice.
Context – Media companies have been tirelessly lobbying for years to have governments compel Google and Meta to pay them when news content appears on their platforms. Australia and France were the most responsive. The Australian model was to impose licensing rates on Google and Meta through a government arbiter. France used the neighboring rights provision of the 2019 EU Copyright Directive and the threat of antitrust sanctions to force Google to pay when “snippets” were used in search results. While Google has generally agreed to pay media tolls, Meta broke ranks in 2023. They blocked news in Canada rather than comply with their Australia-style regime and ended snippets for media posts in Poland to avoid neighboring rights payments. Following the ECJ ruling, Meta is likely to face the decision to cut off snippets elsewhere in Europe, as the court appeared to leave that option open. In Australia, the Government plans for a new digital services tax on large platforms that won’t pay media companies with the funds going to media companies. It is aimed at Meta. Media companies often want TikTok and X to be brought into the payment regimes and to be paid for AI uses as well.