AI law and the newsroom, October 29–30: Paris upholds Meta's duty to show publishers the numbers, and New York publishers ask a court to reject fair use

This issue covers 29 and 30 October 2026, the day since the last one, in two items. A Paris appeal court refused Meta's challenge to orders requiring it to negotiate with French publishers on transparent terms and to hand over the data needed to price their articles. In New York, four publishing bodies asked a court to reject OpenAI's fair-use defence.

Three questions run through both. What does a platform owe the publishers whose work it distributes, and who sets the price? How far does a national ruling travel? And which date, if any, binds a newsroom now?

Meta lost both of its appeals on Thursday 29 October. The Paris Court of Appeal upheld the two sets of interim measures that the French competition authority, the Autorité de la concurrence, issued on 8 July 2026. 12

One decision, 26-MC-02, answered a request from the Société des droits voisins de la presse, DVP, a collective management body tied to SACEM that represents press publishers and agencies. 3 The DVP appeal was docketed as RG 26/12581. 3 The other, 26-MC-01, answered the Alliance de la presse d'information générale, APIG. 4

The Authority ordered four things in July, and all four survive the appeal. Meta must negotiate in good faith on transparent, objective and non-discriminatory criteria, covering its use of press content from the start of 2025. 4 It must give the other side the information needed to assess its offers, which the decisions specify and which were due within 15 days. 4 It must leave the display of members' content untouched while the talks run. 4 And it must report regularly to the Authority on how it is complying. 4

The background to the order is unpaid use. Meta's earlier agreements ran out on 31 December 2024 for DVP members and 31 January 2025 for APIG's, and no remuneration has been paid since, while the publishers' content has stayed on Meta's services. 4

DVP's lawyers say the court rejected every ground Meta raised. 3 It held that competition law applies in full alongside the sector-specific press-publishing rules, so Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Article L. 420-2 of the commercial code reach these negotiations. 3

The reasoning, in the account those lawyers give of the judgment, turns on information. The court found the data and methodology Meta disclosed opaque and incomplete, in a form that could produce payments largely unrelated to how much of a publisher's work was used. 3 It found Meta's conduct the direct and certain cause of publishers being unable to establish a fair price. 3 It found the whole set of injunctions proportionate. 3

The court's own statement to reporters, which three outlets carried, says the same in fewer words. Meta's practices "may constitute an abuse of a dominant position, which is prohibited under both European and French competition law". 1 "The transparency conditions required for the determination of a fair price did not appear to be met." 5 The conduct, the court said, caused "serious and immediate harm to the press sector". 2

Meta was ordered to pay DVP 40,000 euros under Article 700 of the code of civil procedure, and the costs of the appeal. 3

Four limits belong with the ruling, and each one decides what a newsroom outside France can do with it.

The first is scope. This is a French decision about French press content distributed on Meta's services, brought by two French bodies for their members. 4 Its reach stops at the French market and at the members of those two bodies.

The second is status. These are interim measures, taken while the Authority investigates. The finding of abuse is still to come at the merits stage, and the injunctions hold until then. 45

The third is Meta's position. A spokesperson said the company was disappointed, was assessing next steps, and would keep complying with the interim measures and negotiate in good faith. 1 DVP called the ruling "a major development" and asked Meta to meet its obligations in full. 2

The fourth is the document. No copy of the judgment was published on the day; Courthouse News reported that the full ruling was not immediately available. 5 Everything quoted above is the court's press statement as reporters carried it, or DVP's lawyers' account of the reasoning. The court's own words on market definition and on each injunction remain unread outside the case.

What travels is the instrument. A competition authority can order a platform to disclose how a publisher's work was used and what it earned, and an appeal court will uphold that order on the ground that no fair price can be negotiated without it. Brad Spitz, a lawyer following the case, told Courthouse News he had expected the result, because the Authority had already taken this route against Google. "There's an abuse of a dominant position and transparency is absolutely necessary if you want to be able to negotiate," he said. 5

The July decisions deal with the neighbouring right on press content Meta distributes on Facebook and Instagram, in the form France gave that right when it transposed the 2019 digital single market directive. 4 Training, crawling and the new commercial terms sit outside them. 4

The overlap is the counterparty. The company now negotiating a press-content price under a court-backed duty of disclosure is the same one whose new commercial terms publishers are challenging in Oslo, in Brussels and before United States senators.

On the same Thursday, four publishing organisations filed a brief in the copyright case against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York. 6 They are the Association of American Publishers, the scientific, technical and medical publishers' association STM, the Independent Book Publishers Association and Copyright Clearance Center. 6

The case, In re: OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation, consolidates actions filed over three years against OpenAI and Microsoft. 6 The plaintiffs include authors, publishers and news publishers; among the consolidated suits is the Authors Guild action of September 2023, brought with David Baldacci, John Grisham and Scott Turow. 6

The brief asks the court to do one thing: grant the plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment on the merits and deny the defendants'. 6 Four outside organisations are backing a dispositive motion that the parties have already filed.

Their argument is that training is an ordinary commercial use. "Using copyrighted works to train generative AI models does not warrant special treatment," the brief says. And: "The technological innovation of AI is no talisman for fair use. The fair use doctrine is intended to adapt—not yield—to changes in technology." 6

The brief also puts a price on the market it says is already working. It states that licensing for AI training was worth 5.2 billion dollars in 2025, with text the largest share, and projects 55.8 billion dollars by 2035. 6 Those are the amici's figures, filed with the court as evidence that a market exists.

The motion is still pending. The AAP says the decision will likely be the first opinion from a New York court on copyright and AI training. 6

An amicus brief is an argument from parties outside a case, with persuasive weight and no more; the court decides on the papers filed by the parties themselves. 6 What a publisher can take from this one is narrow and concrete: a statement of the licensing-market case, on the record, for the moment an AI company says its use of that publisher's work needs no permission.

The Paris ruling belongs in prose rather than in the table: its orders run until the Authority finishes its investigation, which has no published date. 4

One instrument still carries a date its owner has abandoned. The preview page for Meta's revised commercial terms read "These updates will come into effect on 20 November 2026" when it was checked this morning. 7 That is two days after the company's vice-president of communications said the consultation could run past 20 November and the date would then slip. 1

The nearest date belongs to a senator. Adam Schiff's letter to Meta, which asks for specific guarantees on paywalls and on robots.txt, sets a reply deadline of 2 November. 8

The day after that, the European Commission's consultation on technology and copyright closes. 9

The first round of payments in the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement is due on 15 November 10, and Australia's joint select committee reports on 30 November. 11

The 2 December date holds: the AI Act's prohibitions on systems that generate non-consensual intimate material and child sexual abuse material, and the Article 50(2) marking duty for systems already on the market. 12 Pennsylvania's disclosure duty for AI-altered advertising lands on 21 December. 13

Four matters carry no date. Meta has set none for the end of its consultation or for the arrival of the terms its page still dates to 20 November. 1 The Paris case returns to the Authority for a decision on the merits, which holds the injunctions in place until it comes. 5 The New York motion for summary judgment is pending. 6 And New York's Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act passed both chambers in June and remains with Governor Kathy Hochul, unsigned. 14