French Publishers Accuse Musk Of Ditching Snippets To Skirt Ridiculous French Copyright/Neighboring Rights Law

So, yesterday we had the story of how, at Elon's personal request, exTwitter is moving to get rid of link and snippet text in what had been known as Twitter Cards for news organizations. Musk claims that it's for esthetic" reasons, though in our article, we noted the uncanny timing of this decision coming just a few weeks after the French news agency AFP had sued exTwitter in France, claiming that the snippets violate France's neighboring rights law.

As we discussed both the law and this lawsuit are incredibly stupid. Even if we accept that France has this law, the lawsuit still makes no sense. If AFP doesn't want snippets to appear on exTwitter IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE SET UP TWITTER CARDS for its site. But it did. So, AFP is suing exTwitter for something that AFP itself setup. It's incredibly stupid.

So stupid that one would hope that Elon Musk and his hardcore street fighter litigation" team would fight it. When Musk announced this hardcore" litigation team, he made some promises that he has regularly failed to keep, including that his litigation team will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose."

So, look, the AFP lawsuit is completely unjust. Even if ignoring how stupid France's neighboring rights law is, AFP shouldn't get away for suing exTwitter for actions that AFP themselves setup by enabling the Twitter cards.

But, French media publishers are already claiming that this new move to get rid of snippets altogether is the company trying to get out of complying with the law:

Musk's decision to scrap headlines and texts is not surprising," Emmanuel Parody, secretary-general of content providers lobby GESTE, told POLITICO. By doing so, the online platform effectively removes the last things" that would have ensured it's covered by the copyright rules.

But... that makes no sense. First off, even with the coincidental timing of the AFP lawsuit and then the removal of snippets, I'm still not convinced Musk would completely ditch all snippets globally, just because of a stupid French law (other countries implementing similar neighboring rights laws are generally basing it on the links themselves, rather than the snippets).

And, if Musk was doing it to avoid the French snippet tax, he should straight up say that, because (like Meta and Google are doing in Canada) it helps let the public know what stupid corrupt laws politicians are passing to create a system to funnel money from successful internet companies to lazy, failed, media publishers.

Also, if it is for that reason, then it goes against Musk's promise to use his lawyers such that they would never surrender... an unjust case" because this is the ultimate surrender. Fight the case. Highlight how stupid these neighboring rights laws are in general. But, even better, highlight how particularly stupid the AFP case is because the only reason AFP snippets show on Twitter is because AFP set them up to show.