Google Inc must extend its offer made last week to pay French publishers
for use of their content to all media companies across Europe, the head
of the European Publishers Council said on Thursday.
Last week, the
internet search giant agreed to pay 60 million euros into a special fund
to help French media develop their presence on the Internet. It will
not pay them for posting links to their content.
French publishers had demanded licensing fees for headlines and snippets of articles in its search engine results.
Google
settled a similar case with Belgian publishers in December by helping
them boost online revenue, but still faces a dispute with publishers in
Germany.
"Search engines get more than 90 percent of revenues from
online advertising and a substantial part of these come directly or
indirectly from the free access to professional news or entertainment
content produced by the media," Francisco Pinto Balsemao told Reuters.
"The
situation is very bad for media groups (in Europe). This use is carried
out without the authorisation from copyright holders or without any
payment in return. So, all aggregators, like Google, should pay.
"Google's openness to negotiate and talk looks like a good step that must now be followed in other (European) countries."
The
EPC represents 26 of the main media groups operating in Europe,
including Thomson Reuters, Prisa, News International, Axel Springer and
Impresa.
Advertising revenues in Portugal fell by 90 million euros last year to 526 million euros, its lowest since 1997.
Balsemao
is also Chief Executive Officer of Portuguese media group Impresa,
which owns Portugal's best-selling weekly Expresso and television
channel SIC.
© Thomson Reuters 2013