AI’s Demands are Bad and They Should Feel Bad
“But Mom! I want to! Other people are doing it!”
Did that ever work? My mom said, “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”
AI bigwigs are begging to use copyrighted material for free for truly compelling reasons like they want to and other people are doing it.
I believe in AI.
I also believe that people deserve compensation for their work.
If everyone doesn’t deserve to get paid for the work we do, why does anyone?
Why does Sam Altman deserve to get paid if we don’t?
Why does Elon Musk deserve to get paid if we don’t?
Why do Google or Microsoft deserve to get paid if we don’t?
Why do the people and organizations with the most money get to use our work for free, but we have to pay them for their work?
Every industry pays for raw material. That’s the basis of market economics.
Why should AI companies be different?
“Because China will do it!” That some people do bad things doesn’t make bad things ok.
“We can’t afford to pay!” If your revenue can’t pay for your raw materials, either raise your prices or go out of business. That’s true for every other business and industry.
“You read books, why can’t AI?” Sure, we read books — books we pay for. Unlike an AI, humans are 1:1 for books-to-knowledge. One doctor may serve many clients, but they’re limited by their labor, and we need lots of doctors.
In the case of AI, we’re asking the AI to pay for the training materials it uses to serve trillions of queries, far more than a human ever could. They get more value and utility from training content than humans do, not less.
“You get books from the library!” That our taxes paid for, and the library bought. Corporations don’t use public libraries, corporations buy materials they need.
There are at least 27 lawsuits on AI use of copyrighted materials. 2 have concluded against AI, saying AI definitely has to pay like anyone else. And 25 more pending.
AI companies want special treatment because what they’re doing is illegal.
Normal People Go to Prison For That
I asked ChatGPT about DMCA violations. Here’s what it said, edited for length.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does contain criminal provisions. [C]riminal prosecutions under the DMCA [] usually target large-scale copyright infringement operations.
The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions (17 U.S.C. § 1201) make it illegal to bypass digital rights management (DRM) protections.
The criminal penalties under the DMCA apply when there is willful infringement for commercial advantage or private financial gain.
Most criminal prosecutions under the DMCA involve organized piracy rings, large-scale circumvention, or financial gain.
You risk prison for violating DRM if you’re a member of an organized ring OR engaged in large scale circumvention OR for financial gain?
What if you’re all three?
Like Meta torrenting 82 TB of books?
Like OpenAI scraping the entire NYT archive?
Like Google using their book digitization program to train Gemini?
robots.nxt is Digital Rights Management
What if the government says “you’re more able to pay than anyone, but you shouldn’t have to because you’re mommy’s special little boy!”
That’s when people turn to self-defense, and robots.nxt is self-defense. It’s digital rights management built into your website.
One guy said to me:
You’re going to give up without even trying?
Just take it on the chin when there’s an easy solution?
As for it being legal to crawl, a newsstand can kick you out for reading a magazine you didn’t pay for. That’s not copyright, that’s property rights.
If you paywall content so bots can’t get it without paying you, then it doesn’t matter if content scraping for AI training is legal or not, because they have to pay to get access.
It’s legal to walk across open land. It’s not legal to bypass a fence to cut across closed land. The difference is one has a fence that’s intended to keep people out.
Scraping is legal? Cool! Circumventing DRM at scale for financial gain is criminal.
robots.nxt is DRM for your website. Turn it on, and the legality of scraping is no longer relevant, because circumventing DRM is criminal.
“I don’t want your content, it’s not worth anything to me, so I’m gonna take it.
I’m taking it without paying because I don’t want it.”
If people won’t buy from your store, would you let them shoplift?
If they didn’t want it, they wouldn’t try to scrape it.
If they’re scraping your content, they want it.
If they want it, they’ll pay something.
If they won’t pay anything, they don’t want it.
If they don’t want it, why let them have it?
And if they do want it, make them pay, for God’s sake!
You’re a business! Act like one!
How much will they pay? Let’s talk about that next time.
How robots.nxt Makes Bots Pay for Your Content
I showed you how to see the bots on your website and how to control those bots to squash the 50% of your traffic that costs you overhead but doesn’t make you money.
Now we’re at the turn. The crux. The climax. How to make money from bots on your website. How to make money from AI. How to sell content to scrapers.
Of the 50% of your traffic that’s bots, 2/5 are content scrapers and 3/5 are bad bots. You still want to stop bad bots. That leaves the 2/5 that are content scrapers.
That’s an audience you can convert. You already know they want your content, that’s why they’re on your website. We can find a market clearing price by making AI pay.
- Set up the proxy like I showed you for controlling bots.
- Go to the Access Rules page.
- Click “Enable access rules”, it’s disabled by default.
- The Access Rules default denies access to all bots unless they pay. (You probably want to set it up like I showed you last week so that Search Indexers, Optimizers, and Analytics bots can get through. We’re going to update the standard rules to include that soon.)
- Go to your Content page.
- Click “Enable Pricing”.
- Set your Price per Request to anything you want over $0.01. The suggested price is $0.20. If you set it to $0.00, it turns off pricing. At the moment we only support USD, but we’re working to implement crypto ASAP so you can do smaller increments if you want to.
Pricing is categorical for now, but we’re working on letting you set a different price for every page.
- If you haven’t already, connect your robots.nxt account to your bank with Stripe so that we can deposit the payments you get.
There you go! We’ll alert you whenever you get paid, and at $10 or the end of the month, we’ll deposit the money into your bank.
All of the payments happen invisibly between the robots.nxt server and the bot requesting content. It’s an API, there’s no shopping cart, no checkout page.
If the bot pays, the server sends the content. If the bot doesn’t pay, it gets ignored.
Just like you would be if you went to any other store and said “I’m not going to pay, but give me everything I want anyway.”
Blocking content scraping or making AI pay for your content is that easy.
It’s new cash flow, and how content creators make money in the AI era.
Sign up now to make money from bot traffic. You know you want to.