"We're cautiously supportive of pay-to-crawl systems." The new Creative Commons - not to be confused with the organization that used to support open content sharing - has announced its opinion on 'pay to crawl'. To be clear, "Pay-to-crawl refers to emerging technical systems used by websites to automate compensation for when their digital content - such as text, images, and structured data - is accessed by machines." Here's a CC-authored issue brief. And their position? "Cautiously supportive." This despite all the bad things about such a policy, some of which are even acknowledged by Creative Commons: "pay-to-crawl systems could be cynically exploited by rightsholders to generate excessive profits... (they) could become new concentrations of power, with the ability to dictate how we experience the web... (they) could block off access to content for researchers, nonprofits, cultural heritage institutions, educators, and other actors working in the public interest." All of this would seem to me to make them unambiguously bad. Can the seven principles CC calls for actually protect a free and open web community? Not a chance.
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