The New York Times and The Economist join SPUR — Channel NewsAsia
The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and The Economist joined the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) coalition on October 12. The association seeks to prevent artificial intelligence companies from using publishers’ content or profiting from it without permission. This was reported by Channel NewsAsia, which published Reuters material.
The coalition already has more than 80 participants
SPUR was founded in February. The coalition currently brings together more than 80 participants from over 20 countries. New members also include The Atlantic and Brazil’s National Newspaper Association.
SPUR’s founders include the Financial Times, the BBC and the Associated Press. The coalition, which is fully funded by its members, is developing industry standards and technical systems to track and control the use of content by AI companies, as well as to conclude licensing agreements.
Lawsuits over the use of materials
Publishers are stepping up legal action over the use of their materials to train large language models without permission. Earlier this month, USA Today and several newspapers it owns filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright infringement.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
OpenAI and its investor Microsoft also face similar lawsuits from prominent authors and news organizations, including The New York Times. Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, head of strategic partnerships and chief of staff at The New York Times, said that intellectual property protection and technological development can and should coexist.
A standard for content accounting
SPUR announced the recent introduction of the Content Telemetry Standard. The standard is intended to unify the procedure by which AI agents record and report the use of media content so that creators can receive compensation for their work.
Publishers are also facing a decline in referrals from search engines due to the emergence of AI-generated answers, which allow people to consume information without visiting websites. According to the Reuters Institute, citing Chartbeat, organic referrals from Google Search to more than 2,500 websites worldwide fell by 33% between November 2024 and November 2025.
