How SPUR is building a new economic model for publishers - with technical lead Alex Springer

Publishers are not sitting idle as AI companies scrape their websites and cite their content in response to queries without permission. As their business models are turned upside down by sharply declining referral traffic from search, they are fighting back. That starts with understanding precisely *how* AI companies are scraping their content. In February, a coalition of leading UK news publishers founded the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, or SPUR, an effort to develop and formalize a way for AI companies to make use of journalism in a way that protects publishers’ intellectual property. Dubbed “NATO for news” by FT CEO Jon Slade, the coalition has since rapidly expanded beyond its original founding members, and in June it released what’s known as a draft telemetry standard, an effort aimed at providing the technical foundation and shared language necessary to understand how AI systems use publisher content. With this knowledge, publishers can then start to create informed licensing deals with AI companies. Alex Springer is the technical lead at the SPUR Coalition. He spoke with *The Media Leader* about SPUR’s work, and whether publishers have finally developed the leverage needed to get AI companies to pay fair value for the work they’ve been allegedly stealing. **Highlights:** **4:10:** Redefining publisher value in the AI era **11:11:** The SPUR Coalition: Goals, technical developments, and building co-equal relationships with AI companies **20:01:** Can the long tail of the web be protected from AI copyright theft? **26:41:** Is the publishing industry being incentivised to improve quality? **35:22:** SPUR's draft telemetry standard: what it is and how it works **43:04:** What a new marketplace between publishers and AI companies could look like **51:44:** Government interventions and development timeline **Related articles:** Telemetry: the key to solving AI’s valuation and measurement crisis ‘The first tremors in an earthquake’: Digital publisher revenues decline 4.6% amid falling referral traffic How publishers are fighting to protect their copyright from AI companies