#content-licensing

#content-licensing

It's starting to feel like every corner of the industry wants to be the one to write the rulebook on AI and help publishers get paid for it - and the space is getting almost as dense as the buzzwords themselves. From trade groups racing to set AI standards to vendors rolling out content marketplaces - and everyone else piling in with provenance tech and licensing schemes - the space is filling up fast.

For decades, publishers large and small have created the news, culture, entertainment, and educational resources that shape how society consumes information. Yet in recent years, the rise of artificial intelligence has added a new twist to the ongoing struggle for sustainable publishing. AI companies are building tools capable of generating responses, summaries, and insights trained on vast amounts of web content. The problem? Many publishers see little to no compensation for their role in shaping the data that fuels these systems.

As this co-dependence became outwardly obvious, another aspect of their relationship - this one more formal - was being negotiated in private. Google didn't just need Reddit to fill out its search product. It needed Reddit to train its AI models and to provide those models with fresh material to retrieve, summarize, and synthesize once they were deployed in products.

The publishing company behind USA Today and 220 other publications is today rolling out a chatbot-like tool called DeeperDive that can converse with readers, summarize insights from its journalism, and suggest new content from across its sites. "Visitors now have a trusted AI answer engine on our platform for anything they want to engage with, anything they want to ask," Mike Reed, CEO of Gannett and the USA Today Network, said at the WIRED AI Power Summit in New York, an event that brought together voices from the tech industry, politics, and the world of media. "and it is performing really great."

Google has one crawler, which means they use the same crawler for their search, where they still send us traffic, as they do for their AI products, where they steal our content,

The idea behind RSL is brutally simple. Instead of the old file -- which only said, "yes, you can crawl me," or "no, you can't," and which AI companies often ignore -- publishers can now add something new: machine-readable licensing terms. Want an attribution? You can demand it. Want payment every time an AI crawler ingests your work, or even every time it spits out an answer powered by your article?

Publishers are drafting a new role: the AI negotiator. This person sits at the intersection of legal risk, platform power, and content value.

Adobe has built its reputation on a promise of 'commercially safe' AI through licensed content, giving businesses confidence against copyright issues.