Credit: silvabom/Shutterstock.com

Google has announced that it will not pay French publishers to display extracts from their news articles. The technology company and other republishers of online news in France will shortly be required to do so under French law implementing a new EU copyright directive.

Google will instead only show the headlines of news articles, removing other information such as article extracts and thumbnail pictures unless the publisher allows these to be displayed for free. This could reduce publishers' traffic and hence their online advertising revenue.

The EU copyright directive, which was approved by the European Parliament in April, requires companies operating media platforms such as Google, Facebook and YouTube to obtain licences to host content from publishers.

In passing the legislation, the EU wants to ensure content producers are paid fairly for their work and there is legal transparency and consistency around rights in that work.

The directive states: "In order to achieve a well-functioning and fair marketplace for copyright, there should be rules on rights in publications, on the use of works or other subject matter by online service providers storing and giving access to user-uploaded content, on the transparency of authors' and performers' contracts, on authors' and performers' remuneration, as well as a mechanism for the revocation of rights that authors and performers have transferred on an exclusive basis."

Member states have until June 2021 to implement the directive. France is the first nation to do so, as the directive will come into effect later this month.

The French media was not happy with Google's decision and considered it a circumvention of the European legislation, said Arnaud Touati, founder of the law firm Alto Lawyers in Paris who specialises new technologies and startups.

And it is not clear whether Google can legally circumvent the law with this action and still be in compliance with the new copyright directive.

"There is the text and the spirit of the text, and it is likely that this decision would be subject to a dispute at the European [Union] level," he said.

But Richard Gingras, vice-president for Google News, said the company needs to maintain trust with users and therefore cannot pay for content.

"To uphold that trust, search results must be determined by relevance – not by commercial partnerships… That's why we don't pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result," he said.

"Google helps publishers and journalists by helping people find news content and sending them to news sites. In the world of print, publishers pay newsstands to display their newspapers and magazines so readers can discover them. Google provides this benefit to publishers at no cost."

Arnaud Touati, a lawyer at technology firm Hashtag Avocats, said the decision had been viewed in the French media as a circumvention of European legislation. He added: "This decision raises the question of the real applicability of legislations in general, whether internal or European, to actors [that] have a supranational influence."

Google's decision in France follows soon after another blow for online publishers in the EU. A consortium of German newspaper and magazine publishers earlier this month lost a lawsuit they brought against Google, claiming that the technology company was required under German copyright law to pay for the use of article extracts on Google News.

The EU's Court of Justice ruled that the German legal provision in question was not valid because the European Commission had not been officially notified of it.

In 2014, Google removed Spanish publishers from Google News and closed Google News operations in Spain, after a law was passed that required it and other content platforms that display links to and extracts of news articles to pay fees to the relevant publishers to do so.