In the latest war between AI and the media, major Danish newspapers and television stations threatened to sue OpenAI unless the company compensates the domestic press for allegedly using their content to train models.
“We want to be compensated for our work [which] they have trained their models,” said Karen Rønde, CEO of the Danish Press Publishers Collective Management Organization (DPCMO), which represents 99% of Danish media agencies, including including state broadcaster DR and TV 2, said. Rønde said DPCMO plans to train its model. sue if an agreement is not reached next year.
AI has created a new front in copyright law after a while series belong to lawsuit claims that OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, illegally crawled the websites of news companies to train its AI models. Shortly after those lawsuits, OpenAI reached a series of licensing agreements with major publishers, allowing the company to train future ChatGPT versions on their content. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Now, Danish media is trying to force OpenAI to negotiate collectively with them, an unusual tactic that could provide a model for other small countries if successful. To date, OpenAI has struck multiple deals with individual publishers and has announced content partnerships with the Financial Times and Atlantic, as well as German media conglomerates. Axel SpringerFrench newspaper Le Monde and Spanish group Prisa.
After meeting online and in person with OpenAI earlier this year, Rønde says she was under the impression that Denmark was not a top priority. “Obviously the focus is on the German deal, the French deal, the Spanish deal and of course the US deal,” she said. “There are so many content creators in all the other territories and now they have nothing left.”
Rønde sent a letter to OpenAI’s lawyers at the Dutch firm Brinkhof informing them about Danish copyright law and saying she was waiting for a response. She assumed that OpenAI had used content from Danish newspaper websites because the company had not informed her otherwise, she said. Neither OpenAI nor Brinkhof responded to WIRED’s request for comment.
For Rønde, time is of the essence. She wants to strike a deal with OpenAI and also Google’s Gemini within the next year, before using AI chatbots and Search engine overview Continued removal of publisher sites. “Maybe then it [will be] too late, and the content value of newspaper publishers will—in one, two or three years—be too low,” she said. “If we cannot conclude a cooperation agreement within a reasonably short timeframe, then we need to exercise our rights.”
DPCMO was established in 2021 to help Danish media negotiate with Big Tech. “We need to unite, otherwise we fear that Denmark will be too small a country to be a priority in the discussion with Big Tech,” Rønde said.
Last year, the group reached preliminary licensing agreements with Microsoft’s Bing and Google to feature the Danish publishers’ content in the companies’ search engines. While the agreements state that publishers must be compensated by the two companies, the agreements disagree on amounts.
