News Media Alliance Already Plotting How To Get Free Cash Payments From AI Companies

Last week we wrote about our comments submitted to the Copyright Office’s request on copyright and AI. We tried to make it clear that copyright had no place in the data that is used to train AI, and that computers simply consuming data shouldn’t require any kind of special copyright protection or licensing.

It’s not even remotely surprising that the News Media Alliance (the trade group representing the newspaper industry) would submit a comment saying that of course copyright law should be expanded to make sure that newspaper organizations get more cash — that’s what the News Media Alliance always does.

The increasing use and distribution of generative AI systems and applications, as well as AI-generated materials, raises substantial, unique concerns for newspaper, magazine, and digital media publishers. While the interests of publishers and generative AI developers could align, for example, in a fair exchange of licensing revenues for access to high-quality training materials to facilitate the continued improvement of the models, the promise of partnership has not yet materialized except in a few narrow instances.20 Instead of entering into legal licensing agreements with publishers, generative AI developers have chosen to scrape publisher content without permission and use it for model training and in real-time (grounding) to produce outputs (often in the form of lengthy, expressive summaries) that can directly compete with publisher content and products. And they literally are making billions doing it. Not only can generative AI systems and applications respond to user queries using publisher content but, as discussed in more detail below, an AI chatbot or search interface can, and does, produce outputs that include verbatim quotes and/or closely paraphrases publisher stories.

Just as an aside (though, a somewhat important one), it always stuns me when media organizations argue for stricter copyright and licensing and against fair use, given that so much reporting is literally “quoting verbatim” what other people say, and yet these news organizations seem to think that the quotes that people give them, for free, are somehow the news organizations’ property?

Will the members of the News Media Alliance agree to copyright being expanded such that they need to pay anyone they quote for their quotes? Or does this only work in one direction?

Still, the part that gets me is that with this comment, the NMA released this new report on “the pervasive copying of expressive works to train and fuel generative AI systems is copyright infringement and not fair use.” Beyond the fact that again, the newspapers seem to only want fair use for themselves to be able to quote newsmakers, but not for anyone else to merely read their journalism, this also shows how the strategy of making “big tech pay” newspapers is expanding.

As we’ve been discussing, there have been various efforts around the globe, pushed by the big news publishers, to force Google and Facebook to pay them for linking. These link/snippet taxes (often referred to these days as “news bargaining codes” after the whole “neighboring rights” concept got laughed at) is simply corporate welfare. It’s having the government force one industry (internet companies) to pay another industry (news publishers) for no reason at all.

When discussing the problems of these kinds of laws, one thing I often try to point out is that once you go down this path, it never ends. Other industries will start demanding their own cut, their own corporate welfare, such that successful companies will be pressured to pay unsuccessful companies for being unsuccessful.

And, of course, the news industry certainly won’t stop either. So far, the efforts have targeted mainly Google and Meta/Facebook. But Google and Meta have been fighting back and (mostly) avoiding giving into these taxes by doing things like cutting off links to news in Canada. And, so far, everyone is seeing that having news links matters a lot more to the news orgs than it does to Meta or Google. Meta and Google can do without linking to news. The news orgs, however, have spent the past decade screwing over their own most loyal users while chasing more links from Google and Facebook. And, now, due to their own greed (and failure to innovate), that traffic is going away.

So, what do they do? They go looking for another set of companies they can try to force to pay up.

That’s the underlying message from this report. It’s a recognition that the link tax lifeboat the news orgs were betting on is sinking, so they’re looking at the new hotness, generative AI companies, and saying “hey, how ‘bout we just get governments to force them to pay us.”

It’s pure, cynical greed by the news publishers, and it should be called out as such.

Instead of trying to build out actual loyalty and actual business models, the news companies just look at the actual innovators and just demand free cash.

It’s pathetic.