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This post is written in English.
Press Gazette's running tracker shows how split the news industry is on AI. Just the last few weeks:
| Date | Who | What |
|---|---|---|
| 9 October | USA Today Co v OpenAI | Lawsuit over 19 publications, seeking $250m |
| 16 October | Reach and CNN with Google | Partnerships, amounts not disclosed |
| 21 October | Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press v Anthropic | Lawsuit over alleged use of content for Claude |
| 2 November | New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Daily News, Orlando Sentinel v Brave Software | Lawsuit |
Google says more than 400 publications now take part in its news AI pilot.
These are allegations in lawsuits, not findings. None of these claims has been decided.
What's going on
Publishers face the same question from two directions. If AI answers replace visits, they lose readers. If they refuse to take part, a rival might get paid while they get nothing. So a publisher can reasonably sue one AI company and license to another, and some do.
The Brave case is interesting because Brave isn't a typical AI lab. It shows this is spreading to search and AI answers more broadly.
My read
I don't think courts will settle this neatly, because the fair-use arguments differ by country and by what the model does with the text. In the meantime, licensing deals are quietly setting prices.
That worries me for smaller outlets. Reach and CNN can negotiate with Google, but a local paper mostly can't. Whether collective licensing or pay-per-crawl ideas can fill that gap is what I'd watch.
