To date, if AI companies have trained on YouTube's invaluable supply of videos, subtitles, and other content, they have done so without permission. An AI-focused content licensing startup called Calliope Networks is hoping to change that with its new “License to Scrape,” a program aimed squarely at YouTube stars.
“There is a clear demand from AI companies to scrape YouTube content. We see that in their actions. So what we're trying to do is create a tool that makes it legal and simple for them,” said Dave Davis, CEO of Calliope Networks. Unlike other major social platforms like Reddit, YouTube hasn't signed deals with AI bigwigs to scrape its videos. The appeal of the License to Scrape is that it bypasses the company itself by offering a large amount of YouTube content at once by gathering a group of creators and negotiating a blanket license.
Davis has a background in traditional media licensing; he left a gig at the Motion Picture Licensing Corporation to launch Calliope, thinking that the AI industry would eventually move away from permissionless scraping and adopt licensing as the norm. He is not alone in this belief; It's a boom time for AI data licensing startups. Calliope Networks is a founding member of the Datasets Providers Alliance, a trade group that requires all creators and rights holders to sign up for scraping.
Here's how Davis hopes it will work: YouTube creators who want to license their data will contract with Calliope, who will then sublicense their work for training generative AI foundational models. It needs a critical mass of content to make the deal attractive enough to the AI players first, so the program will need to get YouTubers on board before it can take off properly. Calliope would receive a percentage of the licensing fees paid by the AI companies.
While nothing similar exists yet in the AI world, Davis modeled the scraping licensing format after other parts of the entertainment industry, such as Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), both of which use general licensing for music.
“It's early in the recruiting process,” Davis said. He estimates that Calliope will need to serve at least 25,000 to 50,000 hours of YouTube content before it is taken seriously by the AI industry. That this volume of footage is likely the threshold for blanket licensing shows why collaboration could be the best choice for some creators to make money from AI training. In this industry, volume matters and video generators are powered by a large amount of data.
There are no big names endorsing the license yet, but Calliope has already tapped a few influencer marketing agencies like Viral Nation to get clients on board. “I'm getting really good feedback from creators,” says Bianca Serafini, head of content licensing at Viral Nation. She is confident that a large portion of the company's customer base (nearly 900 YouTubers) will participate. “No one has presented us with anything like this before.”
