New Provisions Prohibiting Scraping and Data Mining

AI is becoming increasingly common across a wide range of applications. In some cases, it is little more than a buzzword used to ride the wave of the AI trend, but in others, it is considerably more substantive.

AI has many uses including data modelling, decision-making, and generating content, but before an AI model can do any of these things, it must be trained. Training is an important part of the development of AI models and is generally carried out using large amounts of data or content including text, images, and video.

Whether you use AI in your business or not, this aspect of the AI boom is relevant to you, particularly where your website is concerned. Much of the content used for AI training is gathered or “scraped” from the web, often without the owners of websites even realising that their valuable content has been hoovered up to train an AI model and benefit another business.

A number of steps can be taken to help prevent data and content being scraped from your website and an important first step is to include an express prohibition in your terms and conditions.

To that end, we have begun adding specific clauses designed to prohibit scraping and text and data mining to our range of Website Terms and Conditions templates, beginning with those for websites focused on digital content (i.e., those websites whose value lies in the content that is being scraped for AI training). Updates to further categories of website terms and conditions will follow over the coming weeks and will be listed on this page.

To find out more about AI training, regulation, IP, and the steps that content owners can take to help prevent their material being used in this way, check out our recent blog post: AI in Business – Training AI and Regulation.