AI content licensing is a publisher granting an AI company the right to use its archive for training or for answers, on terms. Before any deal, you need to know what you hold the rights to, say clearly what is reserved, and be able to see who is reading it.
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The headlines are about the deals. The work is underneath them. A publisher’s archive is a mix of staff journalism it owns, freelance and contributor pieces with varying contracts, syndicated wire copy it may only display, and photography licensed per use. License the whole archive to an AI company and you may be granting rights you do not have.
So we start with the inventory: every item classified by who owns it and what your contracts allow, built from contributor agreements, syndication terms and DAM licence fields, with uncertain items flagged for your rights team rather than guessed.
Then the reservation. In the EU, the copyright directive (2019/790, Article 4) lets rights holders reserve text-and-data mining, provided the reservation is machine-readable. We implement it consistently: robots.txt rules per AI crawler, the TDM Reservation Protocol where you choose to use it, and terms of use that match. Whether a given reservation holds in a given jurisdiction is a legal question for your counsel.
The inventory is only as good as its hardest cases, so the test set is built from them: contributor contracts with unusual clauses, pieces republished from partners, photographs with expired licences. The rights team checks the classification on that sample before the rest of the archive is processed, and the classification of anything licensable is signed off by a person.
The same structured archive serves your own archive search, so the work pays back even if you decide not to license at all.
CMS, DAM and contracts
owned · contributor · syndicated
robots.txt · TDM reservation
which crawlers read what
only for a signed licence
ambiguous ownership
Agreements in which a publisher or platform lets an AI developer use its content, either to train models or to show and cite it in answers, in exchange for payment, attribution or both. The terms vary widely. What every deal depends on is the publisher knowing exactly which content it has the right to license, which is the part we help build.
They can say no in machine-readable form and watch who listens. Robots.txt rules per crawler, a text-and-data-mining reservation under the EU copyright directive, and consistent terms of use set a clear position. Server-log monitoring then shows which crawlers comply. Enforcement against those that do not is a legal matter for your counsel.
Only if the contracts allow it, and many older ones say nothing about AI. That is why the inventory comes first: each item is classified by owner and contract terms, and anything uncertain is held back for your rights team rather than included by default.
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Start with a sample of contracts and archive items; we will show how cleanly ownership can be classified before anything is offered.
30-minute technical call · no deck