No free lunch for AI: NYT, AFP demand content rights
Publishing giants The New York Times, Agence France-Presse, and The Economist have joined over 40 other media outlets in a collective push to safeguard their content from unlicensed use by artificial intelligence firms. This coalition, called the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR), was established in February and has since grown to include more than 80 members from across 20 countries, such as The Atlantic and Brazil's National Association of Newspapers.
Publishers are increasingly employing legal measures to deter AI companies from utilizing their content without consent, with the intention of training sophisticated language models. This legal action follows a recent lawsuit filed by USA Today and several of its affiliated newspapers against OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement. OpenAI and its major investor, Microsoft, are also facing similar copyright claims from notable authors and news organizations, including The New York Times.
The SPUR coalition is working on establishing industry-wide standards and technical frameworks to enable publishers to monitor and control how AI entities utilize their content, as well as to facilitate licensing agreements. Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, head of strategic partnerships and chief of staff at The New York Times, emphasized the importance of balancing intellectual property protection with technological progress in a statement.
Amidst these legal battles, publishers are also facing a significant challenge in the form of declining referral traffic due to AI-generated responses provided by search engines. According to a recent report by the Reuters Institute, organic-search traffic to over 2,500 websites decreased by 33% globally from November 2024 to November 2025, as reported by Chartbeat data.
In response to these challenges, SPUR has recently introduced the Content Telemetry Standard. This initiative aims to standardize the way AI agents record and report their usage of media content, ultimately striving to ensure that content creators receive the compensation they deserve for their work.
Written by urgent.news from The Economic Times's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
