After years of effort, a coalition of 40 media outlets in France successfully obtained a court order to halt the operations of an automated AI-driven news platform.
The publishers were understandably upset that the platform, news.dayfr.com, was using artificial intelligence to scrape, rewrite, and republish their content. Thousands of pirated articles were being posted every day.
Just days before the case was filed in February at the Tribunal de Paris, French publications began publishing articles criticizing news.dayfr.com and its harmful effects on the media industry.
The plaintiffs demanded that major internet service providers (ISPs) in France, including Bouygues Telecom, Free, Sfr, Sfr Fibre, and Orange, be included in the hearing. The objective was to secure an order compelling the ISPs to block access to news.dayfr.com.
Three months later, despite the ISPs' resistance and their requests for the court to confirm the publishers' right to take action, the court issued a blocking order. The May 7th ruling stated, "The Alliance and the publishing companies have sufficiently demonstrated that the disputed site allows users to access protected works without authorization from the rights holders, despite slight modifications to the articles published. Copyright infringement has been established."
The ISPs were given 15 days to block access to the site from within French territory, with the ban set to last for 18 months.
However, challenges remain. News.dayfr.com is already attempting to bypass the block, as observed by TorrentFreak. All the articles listed in the publishers' complaint have been removed, and a new subdomain, euro.dayfr.com, has emerged.
More importantly, the platform uses Mubashir, a content management system also employed by many other websites.
A joint investigation by Liberation and Next revealed that at least 1,000 similar sites are generating infringing content in much the same way, raising concerns that the blocked site may quickly be replaced.
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