Publishers to bill AI firms for unwanted scraping - and take them to court if they don't pay - Press Gazette

Search-only contract with AI company logos.

Google’s new $1bn London headquarters could be receiving a visit from the bailiffs this summer after publishers opened up a new front in the battle against AI bots.

Some 31 UK websites, backed by the Movement for an Open Web (MOW), have added new "Search-Only Contracts" (SOC) to their website terms and conditions which prohibit the copying and repurposing of content by LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

The terms seek to beef up existing robots.txt notices on websites, which are currently widely ignored by generative AI companies.

The contracts set out payment rates, typically £500 per article, for unauthorised website scraping which pave the way for future legal claims. In simple terms, they state that website users enter into a contract when they access a web page and agree not to copy and reuse content without permission.

According to MOW the new system makes it easy for publishers to lodge small legal claims over unwanted scraping. All they need is proof that a particular LLM has taken their work, which is straightforward to establish via targeted questioning of the chatbot in question. The next stage is to issue the owner of the LLM with an invoice and then enforce payment at a local county court if the bill is not paid.

Claims can be started via the website Moneyclaim.gov.uk (at a cost of around £50) and are then decided at a local county (or small claims) court where it is normal for claimants to represent themselves.

If the county court judgment goes against the tech platform and the debt remains unpaid, publishers could send bailiffs to the company’s UK offices to take belongings that the debtor owns and sell them at auction. In Google’s case this could, for example, be one of the £5,500 Metronap sleep pod workplace chairs installed at its huge new King’s Cross headquarters, Platform 37 (due to open this summer).

Co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web and lawyer Tim Cowan said: “This is a straightforward approach to dealing with the complexities of payment for content online. By avoiding copyright and IP law a tried and tested mechanism is available to publishers wishing to assert their content ownership over AI harvesting.

"Using the SOC, website owners can simply invoice AI businesses for the content that they have taken and – if they don’t pay – pursue them through the county courts for quick and cost effective resolution.

“The SOC for the first time puts a price on content usage by AI and – in doing that – creates a viable marketplace for publishers’ content assets. The AI companies can’t ignore this: with a critical mass of support from publishers they are going to be forced to the negotiating table or else will face an ever-growing volume of court summons.

“The CMA’s recent ruling on Google’s AI harvesting further strengthens the position of the Search-Only Contract. It demonstrates that Google’s theft of publisher content without permission is unacceptable and it forbids Google from retaliating against those who choose not to give their content away for free. It places a requirement on Google not to retaliate.”

The website Trusted Reviews has been deluged with AI scrapers from the likes of OpenAI and others despite multiple attempts to stop them.

Candr Media chief executive Chris Dicker has already added the contract terms to the terms and conditions on Trusted Reviews but the AI bots have continued to bombard the site with around 200,000 scrapes per day.

He said: "For too long the AI companies have had a free hand to steal our content, traffic and IP for their own gain. With the Search-Only Contract we finally have a legal means to assert our ownership and take back control.

"The AI companies agree to the terms the moment they access our site, and if they breach them by using our content in their services, we issue a demand for payment. No negotiation, no grey areas. You took it, you pay for it.”

Trade bodies back Search-Only Contracts

The Search-Only Contract has the backing of trade bodies the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and Professional Publishers Association (PPA).

AOP managing director Richard Reeves said: “AOP continues to encourage all publishers to make use of the initiatives at their disposal to support the drive toward a fair value exchange. This is the only way to ensure the marketplace evolves in a direction that sees publishers of original journalism appropriately compensated for the use of their hard-earned, cost inducing intellectual property.

“The Search-Only Contract is one of these initiatives. It is simple to deploy, machine readable, and sitting within the robots.txt protocol, employing a frictionless common legal language that creates consistency, while complimenting existing T&Cs publishers may choose to utilise.

"Easy-to-employ tools such as this will empower our...