Around 50 French newspapers have taken legal action against the US professional social networking medium LinkedIn to force it to respect current neighbouring rights legislation, the Alliance for the General Press (APIG) announced today.

This legislation has for five years allowed news agencies and media outlets to receive financial compensation from platforms when their content is reused by the digital economy giants.

“LinkedIn has been using content from the French press without permission and payment for five years,” explains Pierre Luett, chairman of APIG and chairman and CEO of the Les Echos-Le Parisien group, quoted by Le Figaro.

The Le Figaro group had already taken legal action against the professional social media outlet in question in October on the same grounds.

“Like its parent company, Microsoft, against which APIG took legal action in November, LinkedIn refuses to transmit essential data to assess the use of press content on its site, as well as to negotiate the amount of neighbouring rights,” the newspaper continues.

Press articles are often posted in their entirety by users of the social media outlet, which also frequently features them in its “News” section, it adds.

According to Luett, although negotiations with Google to renew a framework agreement, which was concluded in 2022 for 300 press titles, were “less tough” than five years ago, “relations instead deteriorated with Meta, which had nevertheless concluded the first framework agreement in 2021.”

“The group argues that press content is now less projected by the social media algorithm and that the end of Facebook News drastically modifies the data on which the rights of the previous agreement were based,” according to Le Figaro.