Website & Mobile Compliance

Jesse Saivar, Chair of Greenberg Glusker's Intellectual Property, Digital Media & Content Publishing, and Technology Groups, shared his insights with Digiday on the challenges that content creators face with AI bots scraping their work and the steps they can take to mitigate the problem.

Excerpts:

“They still have a valid claim; their claim is just as valid as the publishers’,” said Jesse Saivar, an IP lawyer at the firm Greenberg Glusker. “It’s just that, A., they likely don’t have the money to fight the claim, and, B., they are not looking at anywhere near the type of recovery that the publishers would have.”

Instead of focusing on their legal options, Saivar said that creators would be better served by focusing on technological solutions to the AI bot scraping problem, such as Raptive’s WordPress plugin. However, individual creators are also more vulnerable than traditional publishers from a technical standpoint. Although companies like Raptive are actively developing free tools that creators can use to block AI bot scraping, these tools are often not as robust as the enterprise-level solutions available to traditional publishers willing to fork over the cash. Fees for premium bot-blocking tools typically cost thousands of dollars per month, with annual subscription costs running in the tens of thousands.