Musk Calls French News Agency’s Copyright Case Against X "Bizarre"
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Elon Musk is at the center of yet another legal battle over money allegedly owed by X, the company formerly known as Twitter. A French international news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), announced yesterday that it has taken legal action in theJudicial Court of Paris to compel X to provide the data needed to assess compensation owed for X users sharing AFP news content on the platform.
Musk's only reported response so far comes in a post formerly known as a tweet.
"This is bizarre," Musk wrote. "They want us to pay *them* for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don't!?"
Musk is seemingly unaware of a European Union directive from 2019 granting news agencies' so-called "neighboring rights." These rights were designed to reduce the "value gap" between publishers and the online platforms that profit off of promoting publishers' content.
AFP filed the copyright case after becoming concerned about "the clear refusal" from X to "enter into discussions regarding the implementation of neighboring rights for the press," the AFP press release said. During discussions, AFP said that X was expected to share data that would help the news agency calculate how much money X owed for profiting off of AFP's news content.
Now AFP is seeking an "urgent injunction" ordering X to "provide all the necessary elements required for assessing the remuneration owed to AFP under the neighboring rights legislation."
X and AFP did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment.
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