License your work to AI or opt out: which pays better?
Opting out is free, is your right under EU law, and depends on crawlers respecting a signal they are not audited on. Licensing is paid, but requires you to prove you own the work and to state your terms in machine readable form. The two are compatible: reserve the right, then sell it.
You permit training or generation for a fee, on stated terms, with a record of the grant.
You reserve the right under the EU text and data mining exception and signal it to crawlers.
How do they compare, point by point?
| CRITERION | LICENSING TO AI | OPTING OUT |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to you | None, it earns | None |
| Revenue | Whatever you negotiate or price | Zero |
| Requires provable ownership | Yes | Helpful, not required |
| Enforceable today | Yes, as a contract | Legally yes in the EU, practically patchy |
| Machine readable | Yes, via a rights API | Yes, via robots.txt and metadata |
| Reversible | At the end of the term | Yes, at any time |
| Works against past training | No | No |
What does opting out actually do?
Under the EU copyright directive, text and data mining of your work is permitted unless you expressly reserve the right in an appropriate machine readable way. Reserving it is your unilateral decision and costs nothing.
In practice the signal is only as good as the crawler's willingness to honour it. The reservation is what gives you a claim later; it is not a technical block.
What does licensing require?
Provable ownership first. Nobody buys a training licence from someone who cannot show they hold the rights to the whole catalogue, including contributions from collaborators.
Then terms a machine can read: what may be trained on, whether outputs may compete with you, whether attribution is required, territory, term and price. A rights endpoint that answers those questions is how the deal happens without a phone call.
Can you do both?
That is the correct position. Reserve the right so that unlicensed use is infringement rather than a permitted exception, then sell licences to anyone who asks.
An opt out with no licence route says no to everyone including buyers. A licence with no reservation gives away the leverage that makes the licence necessary.
Which one should you choose?
CHOOSE LICENSING TO AI WHEN
- You hold clean rights to a body of work
- You can state terms and a price a machine can read
- You would rather be paid than ignored
CHOOSE OPTING OUT WHEN
- You object to the use on principle
- Your ownership is unclear and you need to fix that first
- The work's value depends on it not being reproducible
Common questions
+How do I opt out of AI training?
Reserve the right expressly and machine readably: a statement in your terms, a robots.txt disallow for the known training crawlers, and rights metadata attached to the files themselves. Do all three, because no single one covers every route in.
+Can I charge for AI training on my catalogue?
Yes. It is an ordinary licence with an unusual use type. Price it on the size and uniqueness of the catalogue, and bound it by whether outputs may compete with you.
+Does opting out remove my work from an existing model?
No. It governs future use. Removal from a trained model is not something a reservation can achieve.
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DEED (2026). License your work to AI or opt out: which pays better?. DEED rights register. https://deed.rizzgroup.org/compare/licensing-your-work-to-ai-vs-opting-out