New York is poised to become the first state in the nation to ban tech companies from using deceptive bots to steal information from local news websites and use it for their own products.
State lawmakers passed the New York Stealth Crawlers Prohibition Act before ending their annual session on Friday. It’s now up to Gov. Kathy Hochul to decide whether to sign the bill into law.
The bill prohibits AI systems and other tech companies from using bots that disguise their identity and secretly scrape reports from local newspaper and broadcast websites.
The anonymous bots have become so pervasive that more than 50 percent of the traffic at some news sites is non-human, according to New York news organizations that backed the bill.
The bots are raising costs for news publishers, who must pay to increase computer server bandwith to handle the extra web traffic.
“Bot traffic has overrun the internet, creating real costs for publishers in the form of added defensive technology and lost revenue when bots steal content,” said Tim Kennedy, president of Advance Media New York, publisher of syracuse.com and The Post-Standard.
If Hochul signs the bill into law, the state attorney general would be able to file civil lawsuits against tech companies who violate the law and continue to access news websites with stealth bots. Violators would be subject to civil penalties of up to $15,000 per day for each violation.
News publishers would also be able to go to court to obtain a subpoena that would require internet service providers to disclose the identity of anonymous bot operators.
“These bot operators could act ethically but don’t,” Kennedy said. “New York’s approach is to require a basic level of transparency. The bot has to tell the publisher who it works for and what it plans to do with our content. It’s the right thing to do now because this bad bot trend is growing by the day.”
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Michael Gianaris, passed the Senate with overwhelming support in a 60-1 vote. Assemblymember Steven Otis sponsored the bill that sailed through the Assembly Friday night.
A spokesperson for Hochul said the governor is reviewing the bill but has not taken a position on whether she will sign it.
Diane Kennedy, president of the New York News Publishers Association, said the law would help protect local news organizations, which provide the labor, skill and capital investments needed to produce original journalism.
State lawmakers also passed a separate journalism bill before ending their session.
The bill would preserve access to police radio transmissions for media organizations and first responders. It was passed in response to a move by some police departments to encrypt their communications, including transmissions picked up on police scanners.
Hochul vetoed a similar bill in December, saying the matter should be left to local municipalities to decide.