NYT, The Economist and AFP join AI copyright coalition
Forty major media groups including The New York Times, The Economist and Agence France-Presse (AFP) have joined a global coalition of publishers that is seeking to prevent AI companies from using their journalism without permission, the group announced on Tuesday.
The coalition, known as SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), was launched in February and already included media groups such as the BBC, The Financial Times and the Associated Press news agency as members.
The latest expansion doubles the number of publishers taking part, with the coalition aiming to help media companies track their content, highlight illegal copyright theft, and negotiate commercial deals with the AI groups behind services such as ChatGPT or Claude.
"There is rapidly growing momentum behind our effort to build a fairer, more sustainable information economy," David Buttle, co-founder and spokesperson for the SPUR Coalition, said in a statement.
"We know that high-quality journalism forms the foundations of AI models yet, as it stands, publishers have no mechanism to ensure they are fairly compensated for their work."
Fabrice Fries, the chairman and chief executive officer of Agence France-Presse (AFP), stressed that "each day, millions of people rely on AI assistants for information gathered and verified by news agency journalists."
"That original journalistic value must be recognised, credited and fairly compensated. Content traceability is not only a matter of intellectual property; it is also essential to maintaining public trust," he added in a statement.
Buttle called AFP''s decision to join the coalition "an important step in our growth".
"AFP is one of the world''s leading news agencies, and its journalism is of tremendous value to those developing AI systems. Too often, that value is captured without permission or compensation," he added.
Other news organisations which joined on Tuesday include US-based The Atlantic and Britain''s The Observer newspaper, Radio France, as well as publishers'' associations from Brazil, Japan, Argentina and Colombia.
Obtaining remuneration for their content is a vital issue for publishers whose traditional advertising-based business model has been undercut by social networks.
AI sites have also reduced the number of users going to internet news sites.
The New York Times sued OpenAI -- the maker of ChatGPT -- three years ago in a New York federal court for alleged theft of its copyrighted material used to train the company''s text-generating AI models.
The newspaper has accused OpenAI of committing "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" by using millions of news articles.
OpenAI has since signed content licensing deals with some news publishers around the world including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Le Monde in France and The Telegraph in Britain.