Google has announced a deal with Paris-based news agency Agence France-Presse which will see the Silicon Valley firm pay an undisclosed sum for content in Europe.
The five-year agreement is the result of 18 months of negotiations, and comes as Google is under increasing pressure to pay content providers for material distributed on their platform.
The agreement was described as 'pioneering' by AFP's CEO, Fabrice Fries, who said it will help support AFP's news-gathering and reporting operations across the continent.
It is the first agreement by a news agency under the 2019 European directive on so-called 'neighboring rights' - essentially a form of copyright, created for three categories of people who are not technically authors: performing artists, producers of phonogrammes (symbols used to represent sounds), and those involved in radio and television broadcasting.
Neighboring rights are at the heart of multiple disputes between web giants and the media over payment for use of online news and other content.
Fabrice Fries (right), the CEO of AFP, is seen at AFP's headquarters in Paris with Sebastien Missoffe, the managing director of Google in France
'This is an agreement that covers the whole of the EU, in all of AFP's languages, including in countries that have not enacted the directive,' said Fries.
He said the deal was 'pioneering' and the 'culmination of a long struggle'.
AFP produces and distributes multimedia content to its clients in six languages around the world.
After initially being reluctant to pay French newspapers for the use of their content, Google finally signed a three-year framework agreement with some of the nation's press in early 2021, but was fined $566 million in mid July by the French competition authority for having failed to negotiate 'in good faith'.
Google had initially balked at paying for news, saying news companies benefited from the millions of readers it sends to their websites.
News companies, meanwhile, have been demanding for years that digital giants pay for news content they siphon from commercial media while taking the lion's share of ad revenue.
Google has appealed the July fine, and is continuing talks to reach a new agreement.
AFP has fought for news agencies to be fully eligible to benefit from neighboring rights agreements, Fries said.
Wednesday's deal 'will contribute to the production of quality information and the development
