Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The Disruptive Competition Project(DisCo) has discovered a provision in a French law which requires search engines to pay royalties for the images they index. Although the Freedom of Creation Act was passed in late June, this particular provision in the law hasn't received much attention until now.
Under the provisions of the law, whenever a visual work is published online, the reproduction rights are automatically transferred to a collection agency authorized by the French government. Search engines must get a license from the collection agency in order to index the work and will pay a royalty in return. It will then be up to the collection agency to distribute the royalties to the creator of the work.
Source: http://techraptor.net/content/french-law-requires-search-engines-pay
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday August 30 2016, @02:03AM
Even if royalties were less than a fraction of a Euro, it would cost Google millions upon millions.
I doubt that Google would even be bothered about the royalties. They could make it up by increasing the charge on ads to/from France, etc. The REAL nightmare is having to keep track of those millions of pennies in a way that would survive some auditing process by the French government.