AI copyright win for UK news industry | Times digital subs cover newsroom costs

Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Thursday, 19 March.

👍 Good news from the UK government yesterday as it reacted to overwhelming opposition from the creative industries to its position on copyright and AI.

It had favoured a presumption that AI companies could use whatever they want for training unless copyright holders opted out.

Team Starmer now appears to accept that their enthusiasm for AI as a way to boost sluggish UK productivity needs to be tempered with a copyright regime that does not destroy incentives for original work.

This follows a rare show of unanimity among every UK national newsbrand last year in the form of the Make It Fair campaign.

I wonder if it is also related to Sir Keir’s recent more robust stance towards Donald Trump, who will seek to protect the interests of US tech giants behind his America-first umbrella.

The next challenge is the upcoming regulation of Google by the Competition and Markets Authority under the 2024 Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.

Given the direction of travel indicated by yesterday’s announcement I would be amazed if the CMA does not compel Google to separate its AI scraping from indexing for search (it has already asked it nicely to do so).

If so, this could open a handy new revenue stream as Google (like others) would be forced to pay for the news content needed to fuel its AI platforms.

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🙌 Congratulations to The Times editor Tony Gallagher, who celebrated picking up a Fellowship award from the Society of Editors by revealing that digital subscriptions now more than cover the costs of the 700-strong Times and Sunday Times newsroom.

When other publishers were seeking reach and viral hits on social media in 2010, The Times went behind a paywall.

Its focus on quality and on producing a finishable daily digital edition and app has paid off, and The Times titles now have 659,000 digital subscribers.

Times Media Ltd has actually grown revenue in recent years, which is astonishing given the scale of structural decline for its print titles. Its latest profit (£61m on revenue of £383m) shows that the UK’s oldest national newspaper (launched when America was still a British colony) has a bright future.

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😮 Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy asked on Tuesday whether press regulator IPSO needs to be tougher on publishers, adding press regulation “is the single greatest area in which I am urged by the public to act”.

She also acknowledged concerns about increasingly politicised broadcast news (without specifically name-checking GB News).

My hunch is that most organised campaigners against GB News and wanting press reform are motivated by concerns over bias rather than systematic misbehaviour.

Forthright campaigning by the UK’s market-leading newspapers at the time - the Telegraph, Mail and Sun - may well have helped swing Britain’s narrow vote in favour of Brexit, something which pro-Europeans find unforgivable.

But any form of media regulation that outlaws bias (the freedom to choose a particular point of view) would be a step down the road to state control of how we think.

As Karl Marx put it in an argument against censorship of the press: “You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns.”