SPUR Coalition: Setting Standards for AI Licensing in Journalism
Five major UK news organizations have come together to establish shared AI licensing standards. The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, BBC, and Sky News have formed SPUR: the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition. This coalition aims to address concerns about unlicensed scraping of content by AI companies and work on developing industry standards for sustainable use of journalism by AI tools. The goal is to ensure transparency, scalability, and protection of publishers' intellectual property.
The leaders of the news organizations have co-signed an open letter to their global media counterparts, explaining the purpose of SPUR. They emphasize the importance of establishing technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks to enable AI developers to access high-quality journalism in legitimate ways while ensuring publishers retain control of their content and receive fair value for its use. SPUR is not a licensing body but will provide guidance on pricing structures, such as pay-per-crawl or pay-per-inference models.
SPUR aims to influence decisions related to AI content licensing, particularly in platforms like Microsoft's AI content marketplace and Amazon's planned licensing mechanism. While publishers can still negotiate their own AI licensing deals with tech companies, SPUR encourages more publishers to join the coalition to address the global challenge of AI content usage. The goal is to create a market that supports original reporting, upholds public trust, and fosters responsible AI innovation.
The launch of SPUR follows the suggestion by FT CEO Jon Slade for a collaborative approach in the industry, likening it to a "NATO for news." The coalition invites interested publishers to contact [email protected] to join the initiative. Additionally, Press Gazette previously reported on the development of Really Simple Licensing (RSL), another effort to control and monetize journalism used in large language models. RSL Collective, led by industry experts, aims to provide a standardized approach to licensing journalism for AI applications, with support from numerous media organizations worldwide.