Ziff Davis CEO: if OpenAI can find $750 billion for data centers, it can find money for publishers, too

Recently, the Justice Department issued a Statement of Interest about copyright infringement litigation in the Southern District of New York.

The company I lead, Ziff Davis, is one of the plaintiffs in the case.

This opinion piece is not about arguing the law – that’s better left to the lawyers – but about claims made by the government relating to business and markets.

Claims that frame the government’s unusually strong interest in the case.

The government’s brief declares that it would be “significantly more difficult to develop a robust AI industry” if frontier labs need to enter into licensing agreements.

But dozens of agreements have already been announced between publishers and those frontier labs, most notably OpenAI.

In fact, the government concedes, in a footnote, that it “takes no position on whether a licensing regime would be financially or logistically feasible” and that “both mainstream and independent publishers could enter (and have entered) into licensing agreements.” So, where exactly is the difficulty? What onerous obligation are we placing on frontier labs that would slow their progress? In the past 18 months, a number of services have been launched to make licensing even more turnkey, streamlined, and efficient.

Cloudflare , Tollbit, Really Simple Licensing, and the News Media Alliance, to name a few, have created platforms that make royalty payments simple.

This isn’t surprising because the history of media contains numerous examples of effective licensing frameworks, like ASCAP and BMI, being created to address this very need.

These systems have proven to be rewarding for both large companies and individual creators, addressing the government’s fear that licensing would “disproportionately benefit legacy media outlets.” The publishing industry just needs willing counterparties.

This has been done before, can be done today, and is not difficult.

Another point the government makes is that frontier labs based in countries that are foreign adversaries would not be “encumbered” by licensing requirements.

Likely true.

But do we want to abandon our respect for intellectual property just because our adversaries have? And, again, the “encumbrance” here is not logistical – we ought to reject the notion that a licensing regime is some kind of complex speed bump for American AI.