Microsoft is reportedly discussing with select US publishers a pilot program for its so-called Publisher Content Marketplace, a system that pays publishers for their content when it gets used by AI products, starting with its own Copilot assistant.
The PCM will launch with a limited number of partners before Microsoft hopes to expand the program over time. The company pitched the idea to publishing executives at an invite-only Partner Summit in Monaco last week. Microsoft was allegedly courting them with the message: "You deserve to be paid on the quality of your IP". No concrete launch date for the pilot was shared.
Ever since generative AI exploded in popularity, publishers have been at odds with AI labs over what they see as blatant copyright infringement on a massive scale. This conflict has spawned major legal battles.
The most infamous lawsuit is the one filed in December 2023 between the New York Times and both Microsoft and OpenAI, where the publisher accuses the companies of using millions of its articles without permission to build a competing product. The Authors Guild has also filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, with well-known authors like George R.R. Martin and John Grisham claiming their books were illegally used for training data.
Amidst all this, media giants have called on the US government to step in and regulate the industry. A coalition of over 200 news organizations wants federal agencies to create rules that force AI companies to get consent and pay for content. They are also worried about the damage from AI "hallucinations", where models generate false information and incorrectly attribute it to their publications.
As Axios notes, Microsoft is the first major company to try to build a proper AI marketplace for publishers. Other AI labs like OpenAI have mostly focused on securing one-off licensing deals instead of building a platform for ongoing transactions.
Companies like Cloudflare are also working on a more technical, network-level solution to this problem. The web infrastructure company is developing a system that allows individual websites to charge AI bot scrapers for crawling their content. Its plan involves resurrecting the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" response code to handle these automated microtransactions between a bot and a web server.
Via: Axios