So far, AI companies have trained themselves using YouTube’s invaluable resources of videos, subtitles, and other content, and have done so without permission. Artificial intelligence content licensing startup Calliope Networks is hoping to change that with its recent “License to Scrape” program aimed directly at YouTube stars.
“There is clear demand from AI companies to remove content from YouTube. We see it in their actions. So we’re trying to create a tool that makes it legal and easy for them,” says Calliope Networks CEO Dave Davis. Unlike other major social media platforms such as Reddit, YouTube has not struck a deal with AI influencers to remove its videos. The appeal of the Scrape License is that it bypasses the company itself that hosts a large amount of YouTube content at once, gathering a group of creators and negotiating a blanket license.
Davis has experience in traditional media licensing; he left his job at Motion Picture Licensing Corporation to launch Calliope on the assumption that the AI industry would eventually move away from permissionless scraping and start licensing as the norm. He is not alone in this belief; this is the boom period for AI data licensing startups. Calliope Networks is a founding member of the Datasets Providers Alliance, an industry group that requires all creators and rights holders to consent to scraping.
Davis hopes it will work like this: YouTube creators who want to license their data will strike a deal with Calliope, which will then sublicense their work to train basic generative AI models. It will need a critical mass of content to first make the deal attractive enough to AI players, so the program will need to win over YouTubers before it can properly launch. Calliope would collect a percentage of the licensing fees paid by artificial intelligence companies.
While there’s nothing like it yet in the world of artificial intelligence, Davis has modeled the licensing format for 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 recruiting process,” Davis says. He estimates that Calliope will need to have at least 25,000-50,000 hours of content on YouTube before the AI industry takes it seriously. That this amount of footage is a likely threshold for general licensing shows why joining forces may be the best way for some creators to make money from AI training – in this industry, quantity matters, and video generators use a lot of data.
There are no brands confirming this license yet, but Calliope has already selected several influencer marketing agencies such as Viral Nation to acquire customers. “I’m getting really good feedback from creators,” says Bianca Serafini, director of content licensing at Viral Nation. She is confident that a enormous number of the company’s clients – nearly 900 YouTubers – will take part. “No one has ever presented something like this to us before.”