New AI licensing scheme helps smaller publishers strike deals with platforms
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 …
