A new collective licensing scheme for the “fair and lawful” use of content inAIproducts 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”.
West said the aim is to work with the major AI players as well as small AI start-ups and other companies that may want to use licensed content.
He said althoughlarge news, academic and book publishers have been able to do deals with AI companies, “we have an opportunity through the collective licensing that we do to enable smaller players to access the market, to give them a seat at the table”.
West said there are three reasons why they believe “there will be a market for the collective licence amongst the big players”.
One is access, he said, citing the “trend towards almost a closed web” withCloudflareand Tollbit helping publishers to protect their content from unlicensed scraping.
[Read more:UK and US publishers back move to block AI scrapers by default]
Source: Press Gazette
