CC Signals and Pay to Crawl: What Creative Commons Has Been Working On

In a blog post, Creative Commons' General Counsel, Sarah Hinchliff Pearson the internet as we have come to know it is undergoing major changes, with the removal of content from the web one of the most concerning. 


Pearson wrote,  

"Technology-enabled access to knowledge should be flourishing. Instead, information is being removed from the web or locked away in walled gardens. We are experiencing a crisis in the commons, driven in part by current AI development practices. New systems are emerging in response—from content monetization schemes and licensing agreements designed to protect large rightsholders, to the ongoing morass of lawsuits about how AI services are using content as data."

Given what she views as a "major reconfiguration of how we share and reuse content on the web", she detailed two major developments with CC Signals: 

  • Implementing CC signals on Mozilla Data Collective:
  • Adapting the CC signals contribution element in the RSL framework

For the complete rundown, read the blog post.

In a separate blog post, Creative Commons also weighed in on "pay to crawl", noting that it "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", but there are downsides to it as well.

The blog post is here.