Creative Commons Cautiously Endorses AI 'Pay-to-Crawl' Systems

Creative Commons (CC) has expressed cautious support for pay-to-crawl systems designed to let websites charge AI companies for accessing content during web crawls for model training.

The nonprofit organization outlined its position in a blog post, proposing principles to guide the responsible use of these systems while highlighting potential risks to open access.

Pay-to-crawl mechanisms aim to automate compensation for machine access to digital content such as text and images, addressing disruptions from large AI models that have shifted web interactions from reciprocal to more extractive practices.

In the post, CC stated:

“Implemented responsibly, pay-to-crawl could represent a way for websites to sustain the creation and sharing of their content, and manage substitutive uses, keeping content publicly accessible where it might otherwise not be shared or would disappear behind even more restrictive paywalls.”

The group partnered with the RSL Collective to integrate these systems with standards that allow creators to collect contributions from AI firms, focusing on reciprocity in open standards.

Creative Commons raised concerns that such systems could lead to concentrations of power and resemble digital rights management, potentially controlling content use and limiting human access.

The organization warned that indiscriminate application might block researchers, nonprofits and educators from content, interfering with copyright exceptions like fair use in the United States or noncommercial research in the European Union.

To mitigate these issues, CC recommended avoiding default settings for pay-to-crawl, enabling nuanced choices over blanket rules and preserving public interest access.

The group also called for open, interoperable components in these systems to prevent proprietary lock-ins and suggested allowing throttling of access instead of outright blocking to manage hosting costs from heavy AI traffic.

In a separate analysis, Creative Commons noted:

"Pay-to-crawl systems could be cynically exploited by rightsholders to generate excessive profits, at the expense of human access and without necessarily benefiting the original creators."

The nonprofit urged collective payments to support broader contributions to the digital commons and the avoidance of surveillance architectures.