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By Tassilo Hummel and Mathieu Rosemain
PARIS -LVMH-owned newspaper group Les Echos-Le Parisien is not party to a lawsuit involving French media against Elon Musk's X that it previously said it would join, according to a court official, and four media industry sources said the LVMH papers no longer planned to sue the platform.
Les Echos-Le Parisien and other French newspapers, including publications owned by Le Monde and Le Figaro, declared in November that they would lodge a lawsuit to pressure X to compensate them for currently unpaid-for content visible on the social media platform.
Such fees, which are designed to ensure journalistic content remains widely available on digital platforms while offering publishers more financial stability, are required under the EU's copyright and related rights rules.
Pursuing the lawsuit would have pitted LVMH and its controlling shareholder and CEO, Bernard Arnault, against Musk, the world's richest man and key ally of U.S. President Donald Trump. Arnault attended Trump's inauguration.
Two of the sources said Les Echos-Le Parisien informed high-ranking executives at the other papers that it wasn't going ahead with the lawsuit, without saying what motivated the decision.
"We have indeed made such a threat against X in the past. Other discussions have been held since then," a Les Echos-Le Parisien spokesperson said, declining to elaborate further.
LVMH declined to comment. X's French lawyer declined to comment.
The three media groups jointly won a fast-track court order in May 2024 to compel X to release traffic data and advertising revenues allowing the papers to assess compensation levels for their content.
While Le Monde and Figaro jointly launched the case a month ago in a court filing, the LVMH unit was not part of the proceedings, according to a Paris judicial court clerk who has seen the filing.
EU RULES
Les Echos is France's leading daily business newspaper. Le Parisien is a general news daily.
In an article published by Les Echos in November, Les Echos-Le Parisien CEO Pierre Louette said that X, "just like any other platform" that generates traffic and revenue from the paper's content, "must comply" with the EU copyright rules.
"It's a question of safeguarding quality information, the very foundation of our democracy," he added.
French publishers including Les Echos-Le Parisien had won a similar case before France's competition watchdog against Alphabet's Google in 2021. They also struck a deal with Meta on similar issues.