According to the French regulatory authority, the tech company ‘Google’ was required to make proper copyright arrangements with media organizations and should have informed them that it was employing their content to educate its chatbot.
On Wednesday, French regulators said that Google did not tell press organizations that the search engine was employing their stories to train its machine learning algorithms. It was part of a larger decision regarding Google for how it deals with media organizations.
As part of a 250 million euro (about $270 million) fine for not negotiating proper copyright agreements with media businesses in order to put story links in search results, the French regulatory authority made the information public. The company was also criticized for training its AI chatbot, now named Gemini, with news stories without informing media organizations or providing them with an opportunity to stop their articles from being utilized till September of last year.
Publishers and Google have been fighting for a long time over how much Google should pay to show news stories in results for searches as well as other services. Meta, which owns both Instagram and Facebook, is also having a hard time with attempts by the governments of Australia and Canada to make publications pay them.
The debate has become more important since news organizations are against their stories to be used to teach artificial intelligence. It was in December that the New York Times charged OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright violations in news stories about artificial intelligence systems.
They said there were still legal concerns about whether it was okay to use news material to train artificial intelligence systems. Still, government officials said Google breached an agreement it had made with authors in the past by not telling them that their content was being used for its Bard software. Bard was the old name for Google’s AI chatbot.
The French government has agreed with local authors who say that Google, along with other major tech firms, has taken advantage of their content without paying them properly. Google was fined €500 million by officials in 2022 and told to work out copyright agreements with French publications.
Authorities said Google could have communicated better with publishers in a professional manner because it needed to give important information to the person in charge of the discussions. As for how much to pay authors, the government said Google used “opaque” data and did not entirely take into account every means by which the organization generated revenue from media publications’ material.
Google claimed the penalty was not fair for the problems the authority pointed out, but it agreed to the fine, which was made public on Wednesday.
The organization declared in a statement, “We accepted adjustments because it is time to move on. As our many agreements with publishers show, we want to focus on long-term solutions for connecting people on the internet with quality material as well as collaborate productively with publishers.”
