U.S. ad management firm Mediavine has submitted an official letter to the U.S. Copyright Office demanding stronger copyright protections for content creators in response to generative AI’s growing impact. The company, representing over 17,000 independent digital publishers, also launched a petition urging industry action against unauthorized use of copyrighted material.

“Unauthorized use of copyright protected material to train AI models and the increasing prevalence of AI-generated overlays and summaries that displace source content without attribution and/or compensation threaten to eliminate the very voices whose material AI utilizes,” the letter states.

This public campaign follows Mediavine’s participation in a coalition meeting during the week ending July 30, where over 80 media executives gathered in New York under the “IAB Tech Lab” banner. Mediavine CRO Amanda Martin joined representatives from Google, Meta, and others to address systematic content extraction by AI platforms.

Intellectual property attorneys have also highlighted growing concerns about AI’s impact on creator rights. At Alt Legal’s “2025 I ♡ Trademarks Conference,” experts discussed how individual identity has become a marketable commodity in the creator economy.

“The U.S. Copyright Office does not grant copyright protection to materials that are not created by a human,” Erica Rogers, IP Attorney with Ward and Smith, told Net Influencer after the conference. “But there are issues there because of the prompts. What about the creativity of asking for what you want to be pushed out? There’s human creation there.”

Mediavine’s advocacy follows similar action from the Creators’ Rights Alliance (CRA), a coalition representing over 500,000 professional creators in the UK’s creative industries. The CRA explicitly stated its members do not authorize the use of their copyrighted works for AI training, development, or operation without specific licensing arrangements.

A February 2024 study by the Reuters Institute found that by the end of 2023, 48% of the most widely used news websites across ten countries were blocking OpenAI’s crawlers, while 24% were blocking Google’s AI crawler. The study revealed significant regional variations, with 79% of top U.S. news websites blocking OpenAI compared to just 20% in Mexico and Poland. Legacy print publications were more likely to block AI crawlers (57%) than broadcasters (48%) or digital-born outlets (31%).

The significance of neglecting copyright rules is evident in the federal lawsuit against DeviantArt, which alleges that the company’s 2022 rollout of its “DreamUp” AI image tool constitutes direct copyright infringement by using over 3 million site images to train AI datasets. For illustration, the suit cites a Society of Authors report finding that 26% of surveyed illustrators have already lost work due to generative AI, and 37% have seen income declines.

Proposed Solutions and Framework

Mediavine’s letter urges the Copyright Office to consider five key positions:

1. Clear credit and compensation for AI-generated answers that pull from creator content
2. Rejection of “fair use” designation for AI model training on copyright-protected content
3. Mandated transparency across all generative AI systems regarding training data sources
4. Development of licensing frameworks allowing content creators to opt in and be paid
5. Protection of search equity and content attribution

In parallel, Cloudflare recently launched “pay per crawl” in private beta, offering content creators a mechanism to monetize digital assets while providing AI companies a standardized framework for accessing premium content. The service implements HTTP response code 402 to establish a payment gateway for AI crawlers.

“We wanted content creators to have control over who accesses their work,” Cloudflare stated. “They’d like to allow AI crawlers to access their content, but they’d like to get compensated.”

Mediavine’s petition comes as the U.S. Copyright Office continues examining AI’s impact on creators. In a recently published report, the Office found that training AI models on copyrighted works without consent erodes the value of original work and challenges the foundation of copyright law, but ultimately recommended a “wait-and-see” approach.

“There’s no time for a wait-and-see approach when the stakes are this high,” Eric Hochberger, founder & CEO of Mediavine, said in the letter.

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