Elon Musk’s X faces copyright lawsuit

X, the social media platform once known as Twitter, has been sued on grounds of copyright law by France's international news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), with the aim of securing future payment for its news material.

On 2 August, AFP lodged an application with the Paris court requesting Elon Musk's company to supply data that they deem essential "to evaluate the compensation payable to AFP". They argued that they were relying on EU copyright legislation on "neighbouring rights", which allows media and publishers to demand payment from digital platforms for sharing their work.

According to the agency, AFP has been met with a "clear refusal" from X to engage in copyright talks. In a tweet, Elon Musk described the case as “bizarre”, and raised the question: "They want us to pay them for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t!?”.

Let us recall that, in 2021, AFP had reached an agreement with Google on the same issue after two years of negotiations. It is evident that this is not the first time that the agency has confronted the big tech companies. However, they do not always give in easily, a clear example being Meta’s recent blocking of news from Facebook and Instagram feeds in Canada, in response to a new national law requiring digital giants to pay publishers for such content.

There is no doubt that this dispute between AFP and X and Elon Musk is on course to become a landmark case in the field of copyright and the governance of digital platforms and news agencies – along with other cases. Indeed, AFP is not the only one to be suing X to negotiate neighbouring rights. In July this year, three major French media groups (Le Monde, Le Figaro and Les Échos – Le Parisien) have also launched a similar court procedure.