New York Times Joins SPUR Publisher AI Coalition

The New York Times is among more than 40 new members of SPUR, the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights coalition of publishers seeking common standards for AI licensing deals, Press Gazette reports. Press Gazette has itself joined as an associate member. The expansion takes SPUR to 80 members, publishers and publishing associations, from more than 20 countries.

Other new members include The Atlantic, The Economist, ITV News, The Observer, Which?, Quanta Magazine and L'Equipe. SPUR was launched in February by The Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, BBC and Sky News. "Intellectual property protection and technological advancement can and must co-exist," said Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, SVP of strategic partnerships and executive operations at The New York Times, which sued OpenAI in December 2023 and holds an AI licensing agreement with Amazon.

Earlier this month SPUR launched an open source content telemetry standard designed to record how AI scrapers retrieve content, how it is loaded into an agent's context, cited and displayed in AI answers, and whether users engage with it. SPUR says it is developing tools so AI companies can adopt the measures to improve the efficacy of licensing talks.