Journalists urge EU to resist lobbying by internet giants

Top journalists called on the EU Tuesday to resist intense lobbying by internet giants to gut a law which would force them to pay for the news content they pick up.

European Parliament lawmakers voted in September to compel Google, Facebook and other major tech firms to pay a form of copyright for media stories they use.

The historic decision was hailed by media organizations who claimed they were fleeced for years by search engines and aggregators not paying for their work.

The so-called copyright and neighboring rights law aims to ensure that producers of content – whether news, music or movies – are paid fairly in a digital world.

But a group of 100 leading journalists warned Tuesday that intense lobbying by so-called Big Tech on the law, which also has to be agreed by the Council of Ministers and the European Commission, is “emptying the text of substance.”

Major publishers, including AFP, have pushed for the reform – known as Article 11 – seeing it as an urgent remedy to safeguard quality journalism and the plummeting earnings of traditional media companies.

But opponents have called it a “link tax” that will stifle discourse on the internet.

“Think of the investigative work that goes into publishing the headline ‘Suicide attack in Baghdad Shiite quarter: 32 dead, say police, hospitals,’” said AFP Middle East correspondent Sammy Ketz, in an open letter to the EU supported by leading reporters worldwide.

“To pen this simple line, the journalist has questioned the police to determine what kind of explosion took place, called the hospitals to establish a casualty toll, visited the scene of the blast for a description and to interview witnesses.

“Occasionally he may risk his life because it is not unusual for a secondary attack to happen... This was the case in Kabul recently when nine journalists and photographers lost their lives, including AFP’s Shah Marai,” he said.

Yet lobbyists were trying to “exclude references to ‘factuals’ and ‘snippets’ to exclude press agencies and specialist media, and to reduce the protection period for neighboring rights,” Ketz said.