Nieman Foundation at Harvard
In October, Dow Jones filed a lawsuit against the generative AI startup Perplexity. The publisher accused the AI search engine of “a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers’ copyrighted work.” The claim echoed similar accusations by Forbes and the New York Post earlier this year.
Perplexity’s response was swift and dismissive. “[Dow Jones] prefers to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll,” the company wrote in a statement. “That is not our view of the world.”
Perplexity’s statement makes it seem that negotiating generative AI licensing rights with hundreds, if not thousands, of news publishers is unduly burdensome. But a research tool owned by Dow Jones has now done just that, by negotiating its own AI licensing agreements, for its own AI search feature.
Last month, Factiva announced it had signed generative AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 publishers around the world. The agreements are for the business intelligence platform and news database, which houses articles by online outlets, newspapers, magazines, and transcripts of radio shows. Among the thousands of publishers who signed the agreements are The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and the Swiss outlet AWP Finanznachrichten. Dow Jones’ news brands, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Marketwatch, have also signed on.
“We quite literally went to and are continuing to speak to every single publisher that is within Factiva,” said Traci Mabrey, the general manager of Factiva. “We add the gen AI rights in new agreements and add agreements to what publishers already have signed on to.”
The announcement coincided with the launch of a new search feature on Factiva that offers up short AI-generated summaries in response to search results, along the lines of Google’s AI Overviews or Perplexity’s own AI search engine.
Factiva’s search results include direct links to the original articles cited, and publishers who have signed on will be compensated when their stories surface. The work of licensors who have not signed AI agreements will not surface in the summaries.
Factiva isn’t built for the average search user or news reader. The subscription platform targets professionals in finance, academia, government, and business. The AI search and summary tool will be used by teams conducting due diligence research or analysts drafting reports. Still, the sheer number of contracts negotiated by Dow Jones, and the number of publishers who have agreed to them, stands out. 
In the past month, The Intercept’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI moved into the discovery phase. The Atlantic exposed the use of subtitles from Hollywood films and TV shows to train AI models owned by Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia and Apple. And The New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” letter demanding it stop using its content without permission.
In a climate where the limits of news publisher’s copyright is being tested, Dow Jones says it’s planting a flag in the ground with its Factiva contracts and setting precedent.
“We are a publisher, we have journalists,” Mabrey said, noting Dow Jones would expect similar direct sign-off and compensation if its published work was being used for AI-generated summaries. “Our journalists go to extreme lengths to report the news accurately and fairly. Their work deserves to be recognized, valued, and licensed accordingly, and we believe that the industry at large does as well. For us, it’s highly personal.”
To date, the roster of publishers who have signed the AI agreements operate in 160 countries and publish in 29 languages. Mabrey says Factiva is continuing to negotiate new agreements. “We want to be truly global and be able to speak and be and have content from where each of our professional customers are,” she said.
The negotiations clearly benefited from established trust — many contracts were with existing licensors and Factiva has been paying publishers and working with their licensing teams over the past 25 years.
“We present a really detailed presentation of what we’re doing, how our generative AI solutions work, where their information will be presented. We try to be very transparent so they know that they can trust us with their data,” Mabrey said.
Beyond seeking the explicit approval of publishers to use their content in AI-generated summaries, Factiva is also compensating them directly, according to Mabrey.
The more standard compensation models at Factiva are built around when an individual article is accessed in search results. Mabrey says her team is researching and developing “deeper analytics” as they expand their suite of generative AI tools. These metrics could capture when original reporting, extracted from an article, surfaces. “Now that we are in the generative AI world, we know that we need to bring royalty moments to chunks of data,” she said.
Courtesy of Factiva.
