News Media Alliance Looking to States on AI, Content Protection
The News Media Alliance is looking to state laws, legal action and licensing deals to protect its news publication members from AI exploitation and tech company competition, said NMA President Danielle Coffey at a Media Institute luncheon Wednesday. “We are in the business of news. But no matter how important that news is, it's unsustainable if the business side is struggling, and right now, business is being impacted by difficulties in monetizing our content,” she said.
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AI scraping news content and using it without credit is an “exacerbation” of the same issue the stalled Journalism Competition Preservation Act sought to address, she said. While NMA still believes a federal statute is needed to address the “marketplace imbalance” between news publishers and Google, Coffey said that she believes state laws can also help. She touted California’s public-private agreement with Google that funds news publishers and efforts to pass a similar policy in Oregon. Since a proposed moratorium on state laws regulating AI was left out of the recent federal budget reconciliation bill, state policies on AI are a viable way to protect publishers, she said. News publishers have an ongoing copyright lawsuit against AI company Cohere, said Coffey. AI ingestion of news content “is not a fair use,” she said. “But courts take a long time.”
During a Q&A at the luncheon, Consumer Technology Association CEO Gary Shapiro asked Coffey if NMA would support a solution analogous to the FCC’s do not call list, where companies could opt to exclude AI from using their content. Coffey said that news companies that opt out of Google using their content for AI training are then not included in search results, severely limiting their content’s reach. "It’s a Hobson’s choice,” she said. “Nobody will ever sign up for that op out.”