Jean-Christophe Tortora, Deputy Managing Director of CMA Media, reveals behind the scenes and his expectations with regard to the SPUR coalition in its standoff against the plundering of media content by AI publishers.
JDN. CMA Media joins the board of directors of the Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR) coalition to weigh in on AI. What is your concrete ambition?
J
ean-Christophe Tortora. AI companies plunder content from publishers. As long as publishers act in a fragmented manner, they will persist. We must collectively sit around the table to negotiate the conditions for a new sharing of value. The 77e WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress (which CMA Media co-organized in Marseille, editor’s note)is the starting point of this new deal that we must create.
This congress was a record attendance and demonstrated that manufacturers in our sector are aware that alone they will not be able to influence the players in AI. Certainly, in France we have different organizations and unions, such as the Alliance or the Union of Magazine Press Editors (SEPM), whose work is essential to us. But we must go further to change the balance of power. 30 new publishers join SPUR (including, for France, CMA Media, as a founding member, and SIPA Ouest-France, editor’s note). This is the result of weeks of work and discussions and I am very happy with what we have managed to accomplish in order to build “after Marseille”.
There are not many media outlets that have secured agreements with major AI companies. This is the case of two founding members of SPUR (FT and The Guardian). What does SPUR say to the media that is ignored by these large global corporations?
That we must adopt an offensive attitude towards the platforms, with the essential support of our various governments, so that a general agreement on a structural approach and new rules of the game can be found.
One of SPUR’s main projects is to improve transparency on reporting and the financial conditions of agreements. Do you think AI will be sensitive to this kind of request?
If you come to SPUR with the ambition to better negotiate your contract with OpenAI, you are at the wrong address, that is not our objective. On the contrary, we want to change the rules of our market. The priority is not to try to earn a few euros more but to create a more balanced value chain and better distribute this value. SPUR is not a wicket. We must build together a new industrial architecture on an international scale.
Do you think that Louis Dreyfus, CEO of Le Monde, who entered into a partnership with OpenAI and was present at the Congress in Marseille, is won over by your initiative?
I try to convince publishers who act alone that it is better to come together to exert collective influence. I am not in favor of the counter posture.
Where is CMA Media in its discussions with players like OpenAI?
Personally, I have never approached OpenAI to try to secure a partnership agreement. During the Congress in Marseille, I spoke with OpenAI representatives to understand their vision. One of the interesting aspects that they were kind enough to share with us is the difficulty for them of acting with too many people around the world. An approach like SPUR, which brings together a sector that is far too fragmented today, meets this need.
What is the next step for SPUR in concrete terms?
Other French publishers will join us in the coming days. We will start by drawing up an industrial inventory of all our tools in order to together define a roadmap aimed at building an infrastructure that better protects our companies and our data from LLM attacks. We will only go to see the platforms in a second step. Everyone sees the benefit of being in a collective approach even if no one can guarantee its success. We must remain humble while knowing that whoever tries nothing gets nothing. I trust the SPUR team to draw up an ambitious roadmap.
