Torstar, the Toronto Star’s parent company, has joined an international alliance to help news organizations protect and profit from the journalism that powers artificial intelligence tools.
The company announced Wednesday it will be one of 30 new members of the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) Coalition, a global group focused on helping media organizations monitor, license and commercialize the use of their intellectual property by generative AI systems.
SPUR Coalition says that journalism is being used to train generative AI systems without publishers’ permission or compensation to creators. It is advocating for standards and licensing frameworks that would allow news organizations to better track, control and monetize the use of their content by AI companies, while helping safeguard the economic sustainability of independent journalism.
“Journalists produce content that is foundational for any credible AI system or strategy,” Torstar president Angus Frame said in a statement, adding that publishers should be fairly compensated for the unique, high-quality content they produce.
“Without original and factual news, AI platforms are unable to deliver credible, accurate information to the people using them.”
Torstar is also the parent company of several other news organizations including the Hamilton Spectator, Waterloo Region Record, The Peterborough Examiner, Welland Tribune, Niagara Falls Review, St. Catharines Standard, and dozens of local news brands across Ontario.
Major Canadian media groups such as CBC/Radio-Canada, The Globe and Mail, La Presse, Postmedia, Quebecor and TVO Media Education Group were also announced as new members to the alliance and will be joining founding members the Guardian, the BBC, Financial Times, Sky News and Telegraph Media Group.
Guardian Media Group CEO Anna Bateson said the new members will give the coalition the magnitude needed to create a market ecosystem that works for publishers and developers on a global scale.
“This collective strength will help legitimize the standards we create, safeguarding the intellectual property of publishers and providing AI developers with a route to scalable, sustainable licensing,” she said in a statement Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, Google began to test a control that would allow website owners in the United Kingdom to opt out of the search engine’s AI generated overviews.
“We are fiercely protective of our journalists who produce original reporting that AI can’t replicate,” Frame said. “We have taken legal action against AI companies for their misuse of our journalism. We need transparent systems that respect the intellectual property of journalists.”
In 2024, the Toronto Star and Metroland Media — both owned by Torstar — joined forces with other major Canadian media publishers to launch a lawsuit against tech giant OpenAI.
The outlets say the company is illegally using news articles to train its ChatGPT software and are seeking punitive damages, disgorgement of any profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations’ articles, and an injunction barring OpenAI from using any of the news articles in the future.
None of the allegations contained in the suit have been proven in court.
“Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies’ journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It’s illegal,” the media organizations said in a joint statement at the time.
The suit seeks up to $20,000 in statutory damages per article used by OpenAI, which could put the total value of the suit in the range of billions of dollars.
