It took 18 months for Google and AFP to announce on Wednesday that they had signed an unprecedented European agreement.
Also Agency France-Press is the total amount of material payment received from Google, the value of which is kept confidential.
This is the first such agreement made by a news agency under the European mandate “Copyright Related Rights” ratified by the EU in March 2019.
In the same year, France became the first country to legally adopt this European order.
The agreement covers “the forerunner” and “the entire European Union, in all AFP languages, including countries that do not comply with the mandate in their domestic laws,” said AFP group chairman Fabrice Fries.
Agency France-Press produces newsletters, photos, videos, infographics and interactions and distributes them to subscribers worldwide in six languages.
“This is the culmination of a long war,” Fries said, beginning with the negotiations on a European mandate for the rights of neighboring countries.
“We fought for the news agencies to be fully qualified. The difference between the business partnership is that an agreement must be stable under the relevant rights,” the CEO told AFP.
“We are signing this agreement. We are here to show that the parties can live together and that we have found a solution,” Sebastien Mesoff, general manager of Google France, told AFP.
The agreement came after negotiations between the two sides over the summer were nearly strained.
The general manager of Google in France said that the signing of the agreement “allows to open other issues”.
The two companies said in a joint statement that the relevant rights agreement should be concluded “very soon” through a “plan to combat misinformation”.
Under this program, in particular, Agence France-Presse will provide training courses that verify information across multiple continents.
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