French publishers, such as the French National Magazine Publishers’ Society (SEPM), want to renew the copyright discussion in France, after the German Government supported a draft law to extents copyright protection to fragments of news articles. If the draft is converted to law, search engines, such as Google News, would have to compensate publishers for the republishing of titles and first paragraphs.

Last year, French publishers proposed a law, introducing measures to collect part of the advertisement revenues earned by search engines, as compensation for creators. Although this proposal failed, the recent developments in Germany have created an opening for French news publishers to renew the debate on French copyright law and compensations thereof. 

Following the German developments, the French publishers now seek to find compensation through a share in the advertisement revenues news search engines earn by displaying adds alongside news snippets, which is much the same as in the German proposal. The German proposal aims for the introduction of neighbouring rights for publishers, in case their content is re-used for commercial purposes. 

Guillaume Frappat, head of economic and digital affairs at SEPM, says he doesn’t want to break the balance between copyright and innovation, but also points out that the core of the digital world still relies on content. Although Google did not yet reply to these recent French developments, Google spokesman Kay Oberback thinks the German draft law is "a threat to the freedom of information," and will result in massive damage to the German economy if accepted. Nonetheless, this development is a great example of how a public debate in one country, can influence the debate in another.

Future of Copyright has followed the developments in Germany and will monitor the progress of this debate in France. Previous articles can be found here: 

• German publishers continue lobby for copyright for all commercial use of their content
• German government to introduce copyright fee on aggregated content use
• Google Books reaches agreement with French publishers

Sources: Webwereld, Computerworld

Written by: Nathalie Falot