Publishers have one more tool to assert their reasons against the big network operators, such as Google or Facebook, who publish their articles. Agcom has in fact approved the regulation for fair compensation, which has as its main objective precisely that of facilitating the achievement of agreements between the players in the field.
According to the text, approved by the Authority’s Council with the sole vote against by commissioner Elisa Giomi, advertising revenues will form the basis for calculating the amount of the share due to the publisher. The regulation derives from the copyright law, approved in 2021 in application of the EU copyright directive.
In particular, the objective of the legislation is to bridge the gap between the revenues received by the large platforms for the publication of journalistic content and those that end up in the coffers of the publishers, holders of the rights. According to the law, if within 30 days of the request to start negotiations the parties fail to reach an agreement on the amount of the compensation, each of them can apply to the Authority for its determination.
Within 60 days of the request, Agcom indicates which of the proposals formulated complies with the criteria established by the regulation or, if it does not consider any of the proposals to be compliant, it automatically indicates the amount. The authority, however, provides the tools to reach an agreement by identifying as a basis for the calculation “the advertising revenues of the provider deriving from the online use of the publications”, net of the publisher’s revenues “attributable to the redirection traffic generated on its website” from such publications. Following the negotiation, a share of up to 70% may be attributed to the publisher, determined on the basis of predetermined criteria.
«The approval of the Agcom Regulation on the criteria for determining fair compensation in favor of newspaper publishers is an important and highly anticipated result, which completes the framework of the implementation discipline of the Copyright Directive, transposed into our legal system more than a year ago » says the president of Fieg, Andrea Riffeser Monti who then adds: «In a procedural context with certain times and methods, it will finally be possible, even in the digital ecosystem, to start and conclude fair negotiations, guaranteeing the due rebalancing in the distribution of the value of the product, without jeopardizing the free expression of Internet users”.
Furthermore, the criteria established by law are: number of online consultations of publications; relevance of the publisher on the market; number of journalists employed under national collective agreements; costs incurred by the publisher for technological and infrastructural investments; costs incurred by the service provider for technological and infrastructural investments; publisher and provider adherence to and compliance with self-regulatory codes and international information quality standards; years of activity of the publisher. The regulation also governs the determination of the fair compensation due by media monitoring and press review companies. In this case, the Authority preferred not to indicate a rate, suggesting, however, that those adopted by established market practices be taken into consideration.