EU Court Condemns Meta: Newspapers Have the Right to Be Paid by Platforms for Their Content
[UPDATE] : Following the publication of the following content, we received a note from the Meta Press Office, which we publish in full: "We welcome the confirmation from the Court of Justice of the European Union that Article 15 constitutes an 'exclusive right' and that providers are not required to compensate publishers when they do not use their content." - A spokesperson for Meta.
The Court of Justice of the European Union today issued a landmark ruling regarding the relationship between digital platforms and newspaper publishers. The European judges rejected the appeal filed by Meta against Agcom and established that member states can legitimately recognize publishers' right to 'fair remuneration' for the online use of their journalistic content by tech platforms.
This decision comes after years of legal battles between major digital platforms and the European publishing world, and it substantially strengthens the position of publishers against giants like Meta and Google, which aggregate and display journalistic content daily without any defined obligation to provide remuneration.
Meta's Appeal Against Agcom
The issue arose from a decision by the Communications Regulatory Authority (Agcom), which established the criteria for defining the right to fair remuneration in favor of publishers and a framework for concretely ensuring it. Meta challenged that decision before the TAR, arguing that Italian regulations were incompatible with the Copyright Directive in the digital single market and with the freedom of enterprise guaranteed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. However, as reported by FNSI, the EU Court of Justice ruled against Mark Zuckerberg’s company across the board.
What the Court Established
The European judges clarified that the right to remuneration is compatible with community rules, provided that the compensation constitutes the consideration for the authorization for the online use of publications. A fundamental detail: publishers must remain free to grant the use either gratuitously or, conversely, to deny it altogether. This is therefore not an automatic obligation but a right that publishers can exercise with full autonomy.
The Court also deemed justified two obligations that Agcom included in its resolution: to initiate good faith negotiations between platforms and publishers, and to provide the necessary data for calculating the compensation. This latter point is particularly relevant, as platforms like Meta and Google possess very detailed data on traffic generated by editorial content—information they previously were not required to share with the publishers themselves. The ruling structurally alters this informational asymmetry.
Thus, the European judges framed the decision within a broader rationale: these obligations, while impacting the platforms' freedom of enterprise, help establish a fair balance between this freedom, intellectual property rights, and the right to media freedom and pluralism. This is an explicit acknowledgment that quality journalism has an economic value that platforms cannot ignore.
What Changes for Italian and European Publishers
The ball is now in the hands of member states, which can update their regulations to operationalize the ruling. For Italy, the decision strengthens the framework already established by Agcom with its regulation on fair compensation. For other European countries, it paves the way for the adoption of similar rules regarding all digital platforms that aggregate journalistic content, from Meta to Google, including smaller news aggregators.