Until now, when AI companies have trained on YouTube’s invaluable cache of videos, subtitles and other content, they have done so without permission. An AI-focused content licensing startup called Calliope Networks hopes to change that with its new “License to Scrape,” a program aimed squarely at YouTube stars.
“There is an obvious demand from AI companies to remove content from YouTube. We see it by his actions. So what we’re trying to do is create a tool that makes it legal and simple for them,” says Dave Davis, CEO of Calliope Networks. Unlike other large social platforms, such as Reddit, YouTube has not struck deals with AI bigwigs to scrape its videos. The appeal of the Scrape License is that it prevents the company itself from providing a large volume of YouTube content at once by bringing together a group of creators and negotiating an overall license.
Davis has experience in traditional media licensing; He left a job at Motion Picture Licensing Corporation to launch Calliope, betting that the AI industry would eventually move away from permissionless scraping and toward licensing as the norm. You are 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 opt-in to scraping.
Here’s how Davis hopes it will work: YouTube creators who want to license their data will enter into a contract with Calliope, which will then sublicense their work to train fundamental generative AI models. You’ll first need a critical mass of content to make the deal attractive enough to AI gamers, so the program will need to get YouTubers involved before it can start working properly. Calliope would keep a percentage of the licensing fees paid by AI companies.
Although nothing like this exists yet in the AI world, Davis modeled the scratch 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), which both use general music licenses.
“It’s early in the hiring process,” Davis says. He estimates that Calliope will need to deliver a minimum of 25,000 to 50,000 hours of YouTube content before the AI industry will take it seriously. The fact that this volume of footage is the likely threshold for general licenses demonstrates why joining could be the best option for some creators to make money with AI training: in this business, volume matters and video generators work with a large amount of data.
There are no big names backing the license yet, but Calliope has already enlisted some influencer marketing agencies like Viral Nation to attract clients. “I’ve gotten really good feedback from creators,” says Bianca Serafini, director of content licensing at Viral Nation. He is confident that a large part of the company’s client base, which is around 900 YouTubers, will participate. “No one had presented us with anything like this before.”