3 Count: AI Overview

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1: French Publishers Challenge Google AI Search Over Content Licensing

First off today, TechRepublic reports that French publishers are asking the country’s competition watchdog to examine whether Google’s AI-powered overviews are a violation of existing publisher licensing agreements.

Google introduced the AI overview feature in France on July 22. According to publishers, represented by Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale (APIG), Google is required to negotiate new licensing agreements with publishers for every new feature it introduces.

In 2019, the country adopted a related-rights law, which required search engines to pay publishers for the use of their content. Under this agreement, Google had previously been fined €250 million ($288 million) for using publisher. content to train its Al models. Now publishers are alleging that the new AI overview feature violates the terms of the existing agreements and are seeking additional damages.

2: Phuong Diem Huyen’s Copyright Arrest Warns Other Singers

Next up today, VietNamNet Global reports that Vietnamese police have arrested the YouTube singer Phuong Diem Huyen for alleged copyright violations.

According to the police, Huyen had repeatedly infringed on musical works by uploading her covers of them to YouTube. A singer by trade, Huyen had amassed a following of about 200,000 subscribers on the platform. Her most popular video was viewed over 14 million times.

However, the police allege that she failed to obtain licenses for the music she used in her videos. Depending on the nature of the violation, Huyen could face a fine of up to VND1 billion ($38,000) and up to three years of non-custodial reform.

3: Paris Court Kicks Off New Football Season with Multi-Intermediary Piracy Blocking Orders

Finally today, Ernesto Van der Sar at TorrentFreak writes that the Europe’s new soccer season is set to begin and, ahead of the start of the season, the French telecommunications company Canal+ has asked the Paris Judicial Court to issue a blocking order against more than 70 allegedly infringing domains.

The request is something of an annual tradition in France, which has had various site-blocking laws on the books for some time. However, more recently, who is impacted by these orders has become much broader. Instead of just ISPs and telecoms, the block also targets DNS providers, such as Cloudflare, and VPN providers, such as Proton VPN, CyberGhost and ExpressVPN.

The next major change for the country is on the horizon as a new law will replace this manual system with an automated one. The goal is to have pirated content blocked within 30 minutes of being reported. Those changes are expected to take effect later this year.

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