France has passed a law that will impose a royalty on images that are indexed on the Internet in the country.
The legislation was passed after parliamentarians presented it as a means of ensuring there was renumeration for the rights holders of plastic art, photographs and graphics that were indexed by search engines and indexing services.
When an image is published online, the rights will pass to a government-authorised collection agency.
Search engines will need to obtain a licence from this agency and will have to pay a fee when they index the image in question.
{loadposition sam08}The agency will then distribute the revenue to the creator of the image in question.
According to one report, there have been no instances of a collection agency demanding payment from a search engine based on the law.
There are logistical difficulties in such an agency paying out to the rights holders, given that they may be located in any corner of the globe.
And search engines like Google are unlikely to agree to pay; in 2014, when Spain passed a law that said news aggregators would have to pay news sites for indexing their content, the search giant shut down Google News in Spain.