MARSEILLE, France: Around 30 European and North American media outlets on Wednesday joined a coalition launched by Britain´s BBC, Sky News and The Guardian, aiming to secure fair payment for news content from artificial intelligence giants.
New members of the SPUR Coalition include France´s CMA Media, Switzerland´s Ringier and Canadian groups including The Globe and Mail and CBC/Radio Canada.
“The world´s leading publishers are determined to open a new chapter in their relationship with technology platforms and public authorities,” CMA deputy chief Jean-Christophe Tortora told a gathering of global news publishers´ association WAN-IFRA in southern French city Marseille.
He called for “a ´new deal´ based on fair value sharing, content protection and the defence of reliable and independent journalism”.
SPUR was co-founded by the BBC, Financial Times, Guardian Media Group, Sky News, Telegraph Media and Belgium´s Mediahuis, which operates in several European countries.
Tortora urged French President Emmanuel Macron to raise the publishers´ concerns at this month´s meeting of G7 leaders in Evian, eastern France.
The three-day WAN-IFRA meeting was dominated by the media sector´s fears about whether its business model can survive the emergence of artificial intelligence.
“Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation” to provide training data for large language models, New York Times publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger told the congress on Monday.
SPUR -- short for Standards for Publisher Usage Rights -- argues that news content offered by media outlets comes at a high cost, and that tech and AI firms should pay a fair price for its use.
