In newsrooms’ fair-use fight, everything else is fair play

ORGANISING journalists might be harder than herding cats, but newsrooms are learning that there are many ways to skin other kinds of cats – namely, how to get Big Tech to cough up for news content.

Publishers have spent recent months going to the negotiating table, to court, and to the United States Congress for new rules to protect the sector. When The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement last month, even parties sympathetic to publishers were critical of the move, reckoning that this might not be the best way to reach a resolution.

Such criticisms miss the point. The news-tech tussle isn’t truly about the finer points of “fair use” or the definition of “transformative” work. It is a more practical matter: How big of a nuisance must publishers be to make tech firms share their bounty? Tech firms, like any other firm, assess risks in aggregate. If enough disparate pressures – legal, social and commercial – amass at their doorstep, they will pay to mitigate them the way whole industries have done with environmental, social and governance requirements.