The AI industry’s pursuit of licensable content has been a messy affair, filled with lawsuits and accusations of copyright infringement. Now, as tech companies look for legally safe sources of AI training data, Amazon is reportedly considering launching a marketplace where publishers can license their content directly to AI companies.
According to a report, the e-commerce giant has been meeting with publishing executives and alerting them to its plans to launch such a marketplace. Ahead of a recent conference for publishers, Amazon circulated slides that mentioned a content marketplace.
When asked about the story, an Amazon spokesperson did not deny it but did not directly address the potential marketplace either. The spokesperson stated that Amazon has long-lasting relationships with publishers and is always innovating to serve customers, but had nothing specific to share on this subject at this time.
Amazon would not be the first major tech company to take this route. Microsoft recently launched what it calls a Publisher Content Marketplace. Microsoft says this will give publishers a new revenue stream while providing AI systems with scaled access to premium content through a transparent economic framework for licensing.
The move is a natural next step for the AI industry, which has already sought to solve the legally nebulous problem of copyrighted material in training data by forging deals with major news outlets. OpenAI, for instance, has signed content-licensing partnerships with the Associated Press, Vox Media, News Corp, and The Atlantic, among others.
Those efforts have not been enough to stem the legal fallout. The fight over copyrighted material in AI algorithms has led to a monsoon of lawsuits, and the issue is still being worked out by the judicial system. New regulatory strategies to deal with the issue are being proposed all the time.
Media publishers have also fretted about the ways in which AI summaries, particularly those surfaced by Google in its search results, may be depressing traffic to their sites. One recent study claimed that such summaries have had a devastating impact on the number of users clicking through to websites.
The report notes that publishers may view the new marketplace-based content-sharing system as a more sustainable business model than current, more limited licensing partnerships, one that will scale up revenue as AI usage continues to escalate.