AI apps. Picture: Shutterstock/Tada Images
A new collective licensing scheme for the “fair and lawful” use of content in AI products has launched in the UK.
The project is being led by non-profit organisation Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) and is open to all types of small and large content publishers including magazines, digital news media, books and academic publications (whether they are currently PLS members or not).
The aim is to create an online content store that AI companies will be able to access and use for training models and grounding them in up-to-date sources (via retrieval augmented generation or RAG) in exchange for a licence fee.
Starting this week, with PLS speaking to book publishers at the London Book Fair, publishers are being asked to opt in to this system and then source the content they want to be included.
PLS chief executive Tom West told Press Gazette that if they get it right, “then there is an ongoing and sustainable revenue stream for publishers that simply wasn’t available before”.
He said: “We have a responsibility to our publishers to develop solutions that protect their content, that support copyright and that make sure they get paid when their content is used.”
Three reasons why big AI players will agree to collective licensing market
The content repository has been built by the Copyright Licensing Agency which has begun early discussions with AI companies.
West said the aim is to work with the major AI players as well as small AI start-ups and other companies that may want to use licensed content.
He said although large news, academic and book publishers have been able to do deals with AI companies , “we have an opportunity through the collective licensing that we do to enable smaller players to access the market, to give them a seat at the table”.
West said there are three reasons why they believe “there will be a market for the collective licence amongst the big players”.
One is access, he said, citing the “trend towards almost a closed web” with Cloudflare and Tollbit helping publishers to protect their content from unlicensed scraping.
[Read more: UK and US publishers back move to block AI scrapers by default ]
“As the AI companies encounter greater scarcity… They need reliable, high-quality content, but it’s getting harder to find without actually doing deals with publishers.”
West continued: “Obviously there’s been some highly publicised deals, but a lot of them are happening under NDAs. So there’s definitely demand…. I think where we can really fit in with this space is that niche content that AI companies are going to find it quite difficult to actually source from multiple rightsholders. We bring that economy of scale.”
The second reason, he said, is legal certainty, citing the continually growing number of copyright cases being brought against AI companies.
“I think we’re seeing that sort of paradigm shift towards, actually, it’s probably easier and quicker to licence.”
Thirdly, West feels there is a “growing realisation” from AI companies that they “cannot keep starving those that are producing the content… They’ll be looking at the web and seeing it gradually filling up with crap.”
He added: “They’re not stupid. They know that they need this human-made content.”
He noted AI companies have complained “whether sincerely or not, that it’s far too difficult to actually be able to clear permission for all this content. We’ve got 40 years’ experience of doing just that.”
Urgency for revenue but time needed to get licensing frameworks right
In February the Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky News, The Telegraph and BBC announced the formation of SPUR , the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition in order to develop industry standards on AI licensing. However this group is not a collective licensing body and will not seek to set pricing for use of content for AI.
West said the PLS is in contact with SPUR and “supportive” of what they are doing. “I think there are big opportunities there to work with them on licensing standards.”
PLS is also having conversations with other groups in the UK and internationally such as Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a broad coalition of news publishers that aims to set out an agreed way of controlling and monetising journalism used to feed large language models.
West added: “Time is short but AI is going to be with us for as long as we’re around, I would expect, and so while we’re really keen to motor and develop that market and there’s an urgency to make sure that the publishers start to get that meaningful revenue before it’s too late, I do think we need to take a bit of time to think about how these licensing frameworks can build out over the coming months and years.”
Many publishers ‘don’t have the scale’ for AI deals
PLS is owned and directed by magazine and specialist publisher trade body Professional Publishers Association (PPA) along with the Publishers Association, the Independent Publishers Guild and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. The Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is also involved in the new scheme.
PPA chief executive Sajeeda Merali said in a statement: “Good journalism and specialist content don’t just happen. They take time, investment, expertise and fact-checking.
“As AI tools increasingly pull in and summarise this content, often away from publisher websites and behind paywalls, commercial models are impacted and it’s more than just clicks and subscriptions. It also impacts the audience insight and data that publishers rely on to keep producing high-quality work.
“PPA members represent trusted editorial brands from large international media companies to small, independent publishers, and many simply don’t have the scale needed to influence the deal room. That’s where collective licensing makes sense. It gives publishers strength in numbers and a practical way to make sure their content is used legally, transparently and is compensated properly.
“And this isn’t just about revenue. It’s about protecting editorial standards and making sure the information feeding AI systems is accurate, responsibly sourced and created to the highest possible standards.”
Some PPA member publishers licence their content through the CLA but others do so through NLA Media Access, which is looking at its own plans for an AI solution and would be a separate proposition.
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