In the latest battle between artificial intelligence and the media, major Danish newspapers and television stations are threatening to sue OpenAI if the company does not compensate the national press for allegedly using their content to train its models.
“We want remuneration for our work [which] trained their model,” says Karen Rønde, director general of the Danish Press Publications Collective Management Organization (DPCMO), which represents 99 percent of Danish media, including state broadcaster DR and TV 2. Rønde says the DPCMO plans to file a lawsuit if next year no agreement will be reached.
Now the Danish media is trying to force OpenAI to negotiate with them as a collective, an unusual tactic that, if successful, could provide a model for other small countries. So far, OpenAI has struck deals with publishers on a case-by-case basis and has announced content partnerships with the Financial Times and Atlantic, as well as German media conglomerate Axel Springer, French newspaper Le Monde and Spanish group Prisa.
After meeting with OpenAI online and in person earlier this year, Rønde said she was under the impression that Denmark was not a top priority. “It became clear that the focus was on the German agreement, the French agreement, the Spanish agreement and, of course, the American agreement,” he says. “There are so many content creators in all the other territories that now they are left with nothing.”
Rønde has sent a letter to OpenAI’s lawyer at Dutch company Brinkhof informing him about Danish copyright law, and says she is waiting for a response. She assumes OpenAI was already using content from Danish press sites because the company didn’t tell her otherwise, she says. Neither OpenAI nor Brinkhof responded to WIRED’s request for comment.
For Rønde, time is of the essence. It wants to strike a deal with OpenAI as well as Google Gemini next year, before the use of AI chatbots and search engine reviews further marginalizes publisher sites. – Maybe then [will be] too late, and the value of press publishers’ content will be – in a year, two, three years – too low,” he says. “If we cannot conclude a partnership agreement within a reasonably short period of time, we must assert our rights.”
DPCMO was established in 2021 to support Danish media negotiate with Large Tech. “We had to be united, otherwise we were afraid that Denmark would be too small a country to be a priority in a discussion with Big Tech,” says Rønde.
Last year, the group reached initial licensing agreements with Microsoft’s Bing and Google to display content from Danish publishers on the company’s search engines. Although the contracts specified that publishers should be paid by both companies, there was no agreed amount.