A New(s) Copyright Balancing Act: How American Journalism Institutions Approached the Early Era of Artificial Intelligence and Fair Use

Given the significant investment needed to gather the news, American journalism institutions have historically sought to protect their copyrights. The legal principle of fair use interplays with the ability of users to reshape portions of cultural products to make transformative works. As Large Language Models that empower Artificial Intelligence platforms can be built upon news artifacts, copyright considerations have, to date, evolved faster than legal and regulatory frameworks can respond. Examining public comments submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office in 2023, this study provides a historical snapshot of how copyright was conceptualized by American journalism institutions in the earliest era of AI adoption within newsrooms. This study finds that this set of journalism institutions largely endorsed licensing arrangements for the legal (re)use of journalistic works. At the same time, as viewed through the lens of metajournalistic discourse, the comments provided another public forum for journalism institutions to publicly debate and define the boundaries of the news profession itself.