It’s not been a quick road to the top, but Harlan Coben is officially one of the most prominent writers of crime fiction in the world. Coben’s work has become so popular that he was even tapped to narrate a true-crime series, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist, which follows the author as he exposes shocking murder and scandals that peel back layers of deceit. The show premiered in January and was such a huge hit that it was renewed for Season 2, though the release date is unknown at this time. Coben’s first project of 2026 was Run Away, the bingeable crime thriller led by James Nesbitt and Minnie Driver. Run Away didn’t back down from Stranger Things Season 5 when it first premiered on Netflix, and Coben will have a chance to keep the momentum soon with another binge-worthy crime series.
The Court of Justice of the European Union, sitting in Luxembourg, found in favour of Italy’s communications regulator, AGCOM, which Meta had accused of overstepping its remit by setting the price the social media group must pay for displaying snippets of press articles on Facebook and Instagram. The judgment is likely to embolden newspaper groups across the continent, including in the UK, that have long argued they are negotiating from a position of structural weakness against a handful of dominant American technology platforms.
“The court finds that a right to fair compensation for publishers is consistent with EU law, provided that that remuneration constitutes consideration for authorising their publications to be used online,” the judges said in their ruling.
Meta had argued that the Italian measures were incompatible with the rights publishers already enjoy under European copyright law, and that allowing national regulators to dictate commercial terms amounted to regulatory overreach. The company, which owns WhatsApp alongside its flagship social platforms, said it would study the judgment in full and “engage constructively as the matter returns to the Italian courts”.
For Britain’s beleaguered publishing sector, where regional titles in particular have been hollowed out over the past decade as advertising revenue migrated to Silicon Valley, the ruling will be watched closely. Although the UK is no longer bound by Court of Justice decisions following Brexit, Westminster has been drafting its own framework for compelling platforms to strike commercial deals with news publishers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. The European judgment provides political cover for ministers minded to take a firmer line.
The European Publishers Council was quick to claim victory. Angela Mills Wade, its executive director, said the ruling acknowledged “the economic reality that publishers cannot negotiate on equal terms with dominant online platforms without transparency, access to relevant data, and safeguards against coercive behaviour”.
“This crucial decision comes at a time when AI-driven and platform-mediated uses of journalistic content are rapidly expanding,” she added. “This important ruling will pave the way for fairer negotiations with gatekeepers which have been abusing their dominance by refusing to negotiate in good faith. Quality journalism depends on the ability of publishers to recoup the investments required to produce trusted news and information.”
The decision lands at a fraught moment for relations between the technology industry and the creative economy. Earlier this month, five of the world’s largest publishing houses, including Elsevier, Hachette and Macmillan, filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta in a New York federal court, alleging that the Silicon Valley group pirated millions of books and academic articles to train Llama, its large language model. Works cited in the complaint include N. K. Jemisin’s award-winning novel The Fifth Season and Peter Brown’s bestselling children’s book The Wild Robot.
Meta has vowed to fight the case “aggressively”, but the action is symptomatic of a broader reckoning. Anthropic, the AI start-up backed by Amazon and Google, last year became the first major artificial intelligence company to settle such a claim, agreeing to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve litigation that the company’s lawyers feared could have run into many billions more had it gone to trial.
For owner-managed publishers, freelance journalists and the broader content economy, the direction of travel is becoming clearer. After two decades in which platforms harvested editorial output largely on their own terms, the legal pendulum is swinging, slowly, but unmistakably, back towards those who produce the work in the first place. Whether the compensation flowing from rulings such as this one will be enough to sustain quality journalism is a separate, and arguably more difficult, question.
Read more:
Meta dealt blow by EU court in landmark ruling on publisher payments
About a week ago, Taylor Sheridan scored the biggest original series launch in Paramount+ history with the Yellowstone sequel Dutton Ranch, the latest entry in the hit Western franchise. According to Paramount, the series generated 12.9 million global streaming views within its first seven days, comfortably surpassing the record previously held by another Sheridan hit. Speaking of which, The Madison held the record before that, garnering 8 million views during its first 10 days on the platform following its March debut.
Login