The Associated Press and 28 other news organizations have launched a project to collect fees from aggregators who are reposting their content around the Web.

The project, knowns as NewsRight, will be a separate business that will license original news from the media companies, and collect royalties from aggregators, according to Poynter. The project was formerly known as the News Registry and News Licensing Group, and has been in the pipeline for several years now.

There are other companies doing this already, including the non-profit Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), which represents a large list of content providers including newspapers, books, blogs, and journals. There was also the ill-fated company Righthaven, which put copyright trolls on the map by leveraging lawsuits and threats of lawsuits to collect fees from bloggers and other websites.

NewsRight is just about news organizations though, and it’s already very, very large. It currently has 28 co-investors, 30 additional companies taking part, and 800 news websites. Among its 28 partner organizations are big names including New York Times Co. and Washington Post Co., as well as “most mid-sized newspaper chains, public and private,” states Poynter.

The exact method isn’t clear yet. Whether this will be a massive copyright trolling campaign, or a way of news organizations to sell news online while giving something valuable, has yet to be seen.