French newspapers sue AI-generated news site for copyright infringement
Approximately 40 French news outlets, including Libération, filed a lawsuit seeking to block News.DayFr.com, a website that reportedly uses AI to automatically scrape, plagiarize and generate news articles. The site, created in December 2021, allegedly publishes over 6,000 articles daily using stolen and paraphrased content to generate advertising revenue.
What happened
A group of approximately 40 French newspapers, including Libération, La Dépêche du Midi, Sud Ouest, Publihebdos, La Montagne, Le Télégrapme, and La Nouvelle République du Centre, filed a lawsuit before the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris to demand the blocking of the website News.DayFr.com in France.
The site News.DayFr.com, created in December 2021, is accused of publishing more than 6,000 articles daily that are automatically stolen from news outlets. The site uses AI technologies to plagiarize, paraphrase and invent content protected by copyright.
Reported impact
The site employs automatic machine translations, even for articles already written in French, resulting in notable inconsistencies and errors in the texts.
News.DayFr.com recorded 1.1 million visits in 2024 and generates monthly revenues already in the hundreds of euros according to Similarweb data.
Index analysis
Libération and Next.ink identified at least 1,000 sites fed with news content generated or transformed by AI. These sites primarily aim to generate traffic to maximize advertising revenue.
The Alliance de la presse d'information générale (Apig) supported the initiative, indicating that the objective of the procedure is to create a legal framework to counter such practices.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.