Paywalls can easily be violated, depending on the technology being used. And it’s a problem that can cost publishers money.
Reporters at the Columbia Journalism Review
(CJR) asked Atlas and Comet to pull up a 9,000-word article in the MIT Technology Review, although there was a paywall, and they promptly did so. However, they informed Gadgets 360,
which took the same action after the CJR article appeared, and were denied access, reports India-based newspaper Madhyamam.
Not to get
too wonky, but CJR observes that the Atlas AI agent appears to be a person using a Chrome browser.
When the same request was put to ChatGPT and
Perplexity said they could not retrieve the article when asked. The inside reason: several publishers, including the Review, National Geographic and Philadelphia
Inquirer use “a client-side overlay paywall that asks the user to subscribe or log in.” AI agents are able to read it.
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But server-side paywalls are used
by publications like The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, and will block access until they verify the user’s credentials.
CJR adds:
“We did find that Atlas seems to avoid reading content from media companies that are currently suing OpenAI. (We did not observe the same with Comet.) However, when we prompted Atlas to interact
with these publications, it employed various work-arounds to try to satisfy our requests.
The overall problem is just one more hassle for publishers trying to
keep their content from being misused. Apparently, the answer is to use server-size paywalls and perhaps have their IT teams run the same sort of tests.