Around 30 European and North American media outlets have joined the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights Coalition, known as SPUR, at the World Association of News Publishers congress in Marseille, France, significantly expanding a coalition originally launched by the BBC, Sky News, and The Guardian to secure fair compensation from artificial intelligence companies for the use of published news content. New members include France’s CMA Media, Switzerland’s Ringier, and Canadian groups including The Globe and Mail and CBC/Radio-Canada, with SPUR having been co-founded by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian Media Group, Sky News, Telegraph Media, and Belgium’s Mediahuis.
The three-day WAN-IFRA meeting was dominated by the media sector’s concerns about whether its business model can survive the emergence of artificial intelligence, with New York Times publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger telling the congress that tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation to provide training data for large language models. His remarks captured a sentiment that has been building across the global publishing industry for several years, as artificial intelligence companies have used vast quantities of publicly available news content to train their models without entering into licensing agreements or providing financial compensation to the publishers who produced that content at considerable cost.
SPUR argues that news content offered by media outlets comes at a high cost, and that technology and artificial intelligence firms should pay a fair price for its use. The coalition’s initial aims include developing infrastructure that would allow publishers to measure how their content is used by artificial intelligence systems, as well as facilitating talks on how news producers can license their content to artificial intelligence developers at commercially fair terms. CMA deputy chief Jean-Christophe Tortora called for a new deal based on fair value sharing, content protection, and the defence of reliable and independent journalism, and urged French President Emmanuel Macron to raise the publishers’ concerns at the upcoming Group of Seven leaders’ meeting in Evian, eastern France.
Guardian Media chief and SPUR founding member Anna Bateson said that welcoming 30 new members gives the coalition the scale required to turn its mission into a global mandate, adding that the collective strength would help legitimise the standards being created, safeguard the intellectual property of publishers, and provide artificial intelligence developers with a route to scalable and sustainable licensing arrangements. The expansion of SPUR to include major publishers from France, Switzerland, and Canada signals that the push for fair artificial intelligence compensation is becoming a genuinely international movement rather than a UK-centric initiative, building the kind of cross-border solidarity among publishers that will be needed to negotiate credibly with technology companies that operate at a global scale.
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