SPUR, a coalition of publishers including the New York Times, is lobbying for a common standards for AI licensing deals with big tech.
The New York Times (NYT) has joined a growing list of publishers calling for common standards for AI licensing deals with big tech companies such as Google and OpenAI.
Over 40 publishers have joined the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) coalition, which includes The Atlantic, The Economist, The Observer, and ITV News.
OpenAI has made some individual deals with around 20 publishers, but also have a wave of lawsuits filed against them.
Reach is the latest publisher to make a deal with OpenAI, and US Today Co is the most recent to file legal action against the firm.
Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and executive operations at NYT, said: “Intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist.
“High-quality journalism is crucial to healthy democracies and to the functioning of AI products and experiences. We are proud to work with SPUR to develop robust standards and protections for copyrighted content that are not unilaterally set by tech platforms.”
The NYT announced last year it has reached an agreement with Amazon to cover real-time displays of shorts excerpts and summaries of content inside Amazon services and products such as Alexa.
SPUR launched an open-source content telemetry standard earlier this month, which is described as a “market first move to create a standardised process by which AI agents and model builders record how they use media content and report that usage back to publishers”.
This is aimed at tracking AI scraping tools and determining how a publisher’s content is cited in the chatbots, as well as how a user sees that content, and whether a searcher has engaged with the content.
This comes after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) designated Google with strategic market status in general search services, earlier this year.
The CMA told Google to reach an agreement with publishers to offer “fairer” deal to publishers.
Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA, said: “We have introduced a world‑first requirement on Google’s search services in the UK, enabling fair treatment, greater transparency and meaningful choice for businesses and consumers.
“With features like AI Overviews rapidly reshaping online search, it is crucial that content publishers, including news organisations, have appropriate bargaining power over how their content is used. At the same time, these measures will help tens of millions of UK search users better understand and trust the information presented to them.”
