The New York Times, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and The Economist are among more than 40 media organisations that have joined the publisher coalition SPUR (Standards for Publisher Usage Rights), UK journalism outlet Press Gazette reported on 13 October; the US magazine The Atlantic and Brazil's National Association of Newspapers (ANJ) signed on the same day. SPUR's membership has now reached 80 across more than 20 countries.
SPUR was launched in February 2026 by The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Telegraph, the BBC and Sky News, with the Associated Press among its founding members.
It is not a licensing agency that negotiates for members; instead it sets shared standards for how AI uses news content and builds the supporting technical tools, while each publisher still negotiates its own deals with AI firms.
The coalition has released its first open standard, the Content Telemetry Standard (v1.0). It gives AI agents and model developers a standardised way to record how they use media content — from crawling, to loading content into the context of an AI answer (grounding), to citing it in answers, to how it is displayed to users, and even whether users click, copy or share it — and to report those uses back to publishers as the basis for measurement and payment.
Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, the New York Times' senior vice-president for strategic partnerships and operations, said intellectual-property protection and technological advancement can and must coexist, and that the Times is proud to work with SPUR on copyright protections not set unilaterally by tech platforms. The Times itself sued OpenAI in December 2023 (the case has not yet reached trial), later sued Perplexity, and reached an AI licensing deal with Amazon in May 2025.
J&C notes that for organisations holding large bodies of original content, measurable and accountable usage standards like SPUR's signal that AI copyright is shifting from case-by-case litigation towards industry-wide licensing and measurement frameworks; content owners should watch how such technical standards and licensing frameworks land, take stock of their content assets and chains of rights in advance, and assess their readiness to plug into these licensing and measurement mechanisms.
Source: pressgazette.co.uk
