A court in France has ordered the suspension of access to the news.dayfr.com platform, which published thousands of news stories daily, rewritten by artificial intelligence, without the authors’ consent. 40 major media outlets have filed a lawsuit. The site is due to be blocked for 18 months, but it is already trying to resume operations through a new domain.
The site automatically “digested” and rewrote texts from key French publications using AI, then published them without the permission of the copyright holders. The court found that even a minor change in wording does not exempt from liability for copyright infringement. The Tribunal de Paris ordered providers, including Bouygues Telecom, Free, SFR, Orange, to restrict access to the site on French territory. But news.dayfr.com has already removed some of the content and launched a mirror subdomain — euro.dayfr.com.
The site operated on the basis of the Mubashir CMS system, which is used by hundreds of other pirate news resources. According to the investigation by Libération and Next, at least 1,000 such sites distribute rewritten content without licenses – the scale of AI-piracy is impressive.
The French precedent shows that even the successful blocking of one site cannot stop a network of automated plagiarism. To effectively combat AI-piracy, international regulation, constant monitoring, technical protection and unity between copyright holders are needed.
