• by Ray Schultz , March 16, 2025

News/Media Alliance (NMA) is urging the Trump administration to facilitate responsible AI development by protecting intellectual property rights. 

The NMA has submitted a proposal in response to a call from the administration for input on an AI Action Plan. The plan “should support measures to promote competition and reduce abusive dominance by Big Tech,” it states, adding that it is grateful for the chance to comment.

The NMA’s submission cites several key principles:

Licensing — The NMA encourages licensing, citing the over “100 major licensing deals publicly reported (and many more that are not). These licenses cover a range of copyright industries and AI use cases, including Big and Little Tech (e.g., Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, ProRata, Bria AI) and rightsholders from the publishing (e.g., John Wiley & Sons, News Corp, Conde Nast, Los Angeles Times, Dotdash Meredith, The Texas Tribune), film (Lionsgate), photo (Getty Images, Shutterstock), and music (Universal Music Group, Symphonic Distribution) industries, to name a few.” 

Intellectual property rights — U.S. intellectual  property law “does not require revision,” the proposal notes. “Our intellectual property law is capable and sufficient to address developments related to generative AI.” That said the country’s IP laws “set us apart from countries like China with notoriously lax IP frameworks that lead to fragile economies lacking the depth of American original creativity and innovation.” 

Transparency — Transparency is essential to facilitating “negotiations and allowing rightsholders to identify when their works have been used, the NMA argues. In addition, “model transparency can also mitigate against the suppression of ideas and viewpoints by shedding light on whether AI is trained or operating in a biased manner or facilitating censorship.” The NMA points out that “much content on the internet is crawled and scraped by “bots” which are agents of US and foreign AI companies or those operating on their behalf, which collect content in ways which can often be opaque, leaving web operators, publishers and other creators without the ability to determine the identity or purpose of the bot in question.”

“The growth of AI offers an enormous opportunity for the U.S. economy, and while we embrace AI, we must honor the principles that have made our country successful for hundreds of years,” says Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance.

She adds: “We believe intellectual property rights encourage American innovation, rather than hinder it. By protecting those rights, the U.S. can be a leader in both AI and content creation industries, rather than sacrificing one to benefit the other.”