Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday, January 5th.

Today on Forbes, these startups are making sure AI companies pay up for taking content.

Publishers grappling with AI startups scraping their content to train powerful large language models

often have two choices. They can either sue the company for copyright infringement

or strike a one-off deal to license their archives.

Now, a new class of companies is offering a third option,

promising to help publishers get paid

when their work is cited or summarized by AI,

providing some compensation for lost page

views.

One such company, TollBit, acts like a digital toll booth of sorts, charging AI companies

a price every time they scrape a publisher's content.

Another is ProRata, which develops technology to help AI companies compensate publishers based on how much

of their content shows up in an AI-generated output. Then there's ScalePost, which is building a library

of licensed content that AI companies can pay to access. The stakes are high for publishers

right now. AI heavyweights like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, which early in 2024, repurposed

an exclusive paywalled Forbes investigation across multiple platforms, are notorious for ignoring

the protocols they set to block web crawlers from scraping content.

It has resulted in high-profile lawsuits by the likes

of the New York Times and Dow Jones, who've argued this unauthorized scraping violates copyright law.

Other media companies have decided to partner rather than fight. OpenAI, for instance,

is paying dot-dash Meredith at least $16 million per year to license its content,

...