Should AI pay for web content? Early proposal (HCCP), looking for feedback & collaborators

The Internet was built on openness. People shared knowledge, code, art, and ideas freely—and that openness created the foundation AI now runs on.

The problem:

AI companies have turned the open web into a one-way resource. Blogs, datasets, repos, images—all scraped into billion-dollar models, while creators see nothing in return. If that imbalance persists, the commons risks collapse.

The Human Content Compensation Protocol (HCCP) is an early proposal to fix this. The principle is simple:

Humans consume content the way they do today.

Agentic AI systems that crawl, train on, or generate from content should be required to pay.

The draft combines three layers:

Licensing to clearly separate human vs. AI use.

Technical mechanisms like agent detection, signed requests, and decentralized identity.

Economic plumbing such as micropayments, pooled settlements, and bulk licensing.

This is very early, but that’s intentional: protocols and standards only succeed if they’re shaped by communities before defaults set in. Think of it as robots.txt or Creative Commons for the AI era.

We’re looking for feedback and participation from developers, lawyers, economists, and creators. The repo with the draft is here:
👉 https://github.com/aidanmorgan/fypm

If the open web is to remain sustainable in the age of AI, we need new norms and new protocols. Would love your thoughts—and contributions.