NYT, The Economist and AFP join AI copyright coalition

About 40 major media groups, including The New York Times, The Economist and Agence France-Presse, have joined a global coalition seeking to stop artificial intelligence companies from using journalism without permission, LRT reported Tuesday.

The coalition, known as SPUR, or Standards for Publishers’ Usage Rights, was founded in February. Its existing members include the BBC, the Financial Times and the Associated Press. The latest additions have doubled the number of media organisations participating.

SPUR aims to help media companies track their content, flag copyright infringement and negotiate commercial agreements with AI companies developing services such as ChatGPT and Claude.

“Our efforts to create a fairer, more sustainable information economy are rapidly gaining momentum,” SPUR co-founder and spokesperson David Buttle said. He said quality journalism underpins AI models, but publishers currently have no mechanism to ensure fair payment for their work.

AFP chief executive Fabrice Fries said millions of people use AI assistants every day to find information gathered and verified by news agency journalists. That original journalistic value must be recognised, attributed and fairly compensated, he said, adding that content traceability is also essential to maintaining public trust.

Buttle called AFP’s decision to join an important step in the coalition’s growth, saying the agency’s journalism is valuable to AI developers and is too often used without permission or compensation.

Other organisations joining on Tuesday include the US-based Atlantic, the UK newspaper The Observer, Radio France and publishers’ associations from Brazil, Japan, Argentina and Colombia.

Payment for content is a crucial issue for publishers whose traditional advertising-based business model has been undermined by social media. AI chatbots have also reduced the number of users visiting news websites.

The New York Times sued OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in a federal court in New York three years ago, alleging the company used copyrighted material to train its text-generating AI models. The newspaper accused OpenAI of carrying out “a staggering theft of unprecedented scale” by using millions of news articles.

OpenAI has since signed content-licensing agreements with some publishers around the world, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde in France and The Telegraph in the UK.