French antitrust watchdogs have fined Google 250 million euros for copyright infringement. The internet company used content from French publishing houses and news agencies to train its artificial intelligence (AI) without informing them, the authority announced on Wednesday. As part of a settlement, the Alphabet subsidiary Google agreed not to dispute the facts and to make suggestions for correcting certain deficiencies. The company said it accepted the settlement “because it is time to move on.”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/.”We want to work constructively with French publishers.” However, the amount of the fine is disproportionate.
The cartel investigation was triggered by complaints from major French media companies such as the AFP news agency. The dispute initially appeared to be settled in 2022 when Google withdrew an objection to a 500 million euro fine. In its current decision, the Autorite de la Concurrence accused the US company of disregarding four of the seven points of the agreement at the time. She particularly referred to the AI “Bard,” which was introduced last year and has since been renamed “Gemini.” Because Google did not inform publishers that the software was trained with their content, they were not given the opportunity to negotiate fair prices. Other media companies are also taking action against technology companies. So she sued New York Times the ChatGPT developer Open AI because it had unlawfully used millions of newspaper articles to train the chatbot. (