How To Protect Your Content Against The LLM-Scraper

Generative AI and the large language models (LLMs) powering services such as ChatGPT are having a field day. A recent introduction of an exception for text and data mining in the DSM-Directive means that you as a rights holder must now actively do something to avoid your works being used for training the models.

What to do?

From the DSM-directive (2019/790), we know that the author must "expressly" reserve the use of the work for text and data mining in an "appropriate manner". The directive elaborates that if the content is publicly available online, it may be appropriate to do so with "machine-readable means, , including metadata and terms and conditions of a website or a service ". It can also be done by contractual agreements or a unilateral declaration.