France-Presse news agency sues Elon Musk's X for refusing to pay up
Source The Washington Post
By Julian Mark
Tech giants are facing increasing pressure at home and abroad to pay publishers whose content appears on search engines and social media platforms.
Agence France-Presse, the French news service said Wednesday it will take legal action against Elon Musk's X, alleging that the social media company, formerly known as Twitter, refuses to negotiate payment terms for the agency's news content.
In 2019, France adopted broad European Union copyright rules requiring social networking companies to pay publishers for certain types of content. Google agreed to pay French publishers for news content after months of negotiations.
"These rights were established to allow news agencies and publishers to be remunerated by digital platforms that retain the lion's share of the monetary value generated by the distribution of news content," the agency said in its statement.
In a tweet Wednesday, Musk called the lawsuit "bizarre." "They want us to pay *them* for traffic to their site where they get ad revenue and we don't?" he wrote on the platform, which he bought in October.
