Appeals court upholds Thomson Reuters AI copyright win
The 3rd Circuit upheld Thomson Reuters’ win in the first federal appeals case rejecting fair use for AI training on publisher content.
licensing
More than 300 publishers press Congress on stealth bot bill
Publishers are lobbying for a federal bill that would require stealth crawlers to identify themselves and disclose their purpose.
News UK finds one in five website visits came from bots
News UK CTO Tom Jackson said about 20% of traffic over six months was non-human, with 6% of total traffic blocked as malicious bots.
Axios says AI is breaking the link economy
Similarweb data cited by Axios shows U.S. web traffic to roughly 100 top news sites fell to 47.6 million visits in August.
Unsealed OpenAI emails bolster NYT copyright case
Internal messages on substitution and paywalls give the Times fresh ammunition, while broader publisher leverage still depends on the court.
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Microsoft researcher called AI training the ‘largest theft of labor in human history’
Internal Microsoft comments surfaced in an unsealed New York Times brief seeking to hold Microsoft and OpenAI liable for unauthorized copying.
Cloudflare tightens AI crawler controls for ad-supported publisher sites
Cloudflare will block training and agent crawlers by default on ad-supported pages as it moves toward pay-per-use compensation.
Google expands AI licensing payments based on publishers’ content value
Google is testing a program that pays publishers when their content significantly contributes to Gemini, AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Reuters links CuttingRoom to its MCP server for newsroom AI video editing
Reuters has connected its MCP server to CuttingRoom, letting editors find and edit agency video through plain-language prompts.
Axios publisher says SEO is ‘not the answer anymore’ as AI search grows
Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston says publishers must measure where they appear in AI answers before negotiating any licensing deal.