Apig, a collective organization bringing together nearly 300 French daily newspapers, announced on Monday that it was suing the American company Brave, which operates an Internet browser and a search engine, accusing it of plundering the content of its members using artificial intelligence (AI).
“This action is the first in Europe to target the entire value chain of generative artificial intelligence,” underlined Apig in a press release, specifying that a first hearing is set for September 10 before the Paris judicial court. The Apig (Alliance of the general information press) is carrying out this procedure alongside 53 of its members, including La Croix, L’Équipe, Libération, Les Échos and Ouest France. In total, they are asking Brave for around 80 million euros.
This Californian company has developed an Internet browser of the same name and a search engine (Brave Search). This model is comparable to that of the giant Google, with its Chrome browser and its Google Search search engine, even if Brave is much less known and much less used by the general public.
A procedure for “counterfeiting”
“Brave has integrated AI functionalities into its search engine that synthesize press publications and makes more than forty billion pages available to the generative artificial intelligence ecosystem, via its index, all without authorization,” explained Apig. “This content is used to train and feed the responses of third-party language models in real time,” continued the organization, according to which the subpoena targets “all of these practices.”
Apig and its members also criticize Brave for “the unauthorized exploitation of their brands, in all their variations” (titles, logos, distinctive signs). They are carrying out this procedure for “counterfeiting”, invoking “neighboring rights and trademark rights” of newspapers.
The right related to copyright allows newspapers, magazines or press agencies to be remunerated when their content is reused by Internet players, to which it was extended in 2019 by a European directive. The use of press content is a subject of friction between AI players, often reluctant to pay for it, and the global media, for whom this remuneration is a crucial economic issue.
