BILL NUMBER: S9934A
SPONSOR: GIANARIS
 
TITLE OF BILL:
An act to amend the general business law, in relation to prohibiting the
use of stealth crawlers
 
PURPOSE OF BILL:
The New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act would prevent AI companies
from deploying stealth crawlers, or automated bots that scrape online
news content, in a manner that damages the operation of a news site.
 
SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:
Section one of the bill amends the general business law by adding a new
article 48.
- Section 1750 provides the short title, the "New York Stealth Crawler
Prohibition Act."
-Section 1751 defines the following terms: crawler, covered news site,
journalism provider, person, service provider, and stealth crawler. For
the purposes of this article, an automated bot designed to scrape online
content constitutes a "stealth crawler" if it accesses a covered news
site without disclosing its identity or purpose.
-Section 1752 provides that it shall be a violation of this article for
any person to deploy a stealth crawler in a manner that would damage,
impair or burden the operation of a covered news site or otherwise cause
a news site economic harm.
-Section 1753 relates to the enforcement of this article, authorizing
aggrieved journalism providers to seek an injunction and recover
damages. This section also authorizes journalism providers to request a
subpoena against a service provider for the identification of an alleged
violator.
- Section 1754 provides a severability clause.
Section two of the bill sets the effective date.
 
JUSTIFICATION:
Stealth web crawlers, or automated bots that scrape online content while
evading detection, pose a growing threat to New York's news publishers,
digital markets and the public interest. AI developers have begun to
deploy these bots in recent years with the goal of extracting journalism
without authorization only for them to turn around and reformat this
content for AI consumption. In other words, stealth crawlers have
enabled tech companies to free ride off of the hard work of dedicated
journalists, all while diverting readers away from the publishers' own
websites. This has resulted in a decrease in subscription and advertis-
ing revenue for the news publishers, thus denying compensation to the
very journalists we all depend onto separate the truth from the lies.
Journalists are not the only ones who are adversely impacted; the
proliferation of these bots has also been detrimental to the public at
large. By facilitating the spread of unreliable AI generated content,
stealth crawlers make it much harder for fact-checked, editorial
controlled joumalism to get exposure, leaving the public much less info-
luied.
What's more, stealth crawlers impose significant operational costs on
publishers' technological infrastructure. Because bots generate a ton of
web traffic to these news sites all of which must be processed before
the bots can be filtered or blocked publishers are forced to scale their
infrastructure to handle peak volumes. Not even a paywall is enough to
stop these stealth crawlers: some bots have been found to retrieve
entire articles hidden under a paywall. As a result, publishers must
invest millions of dollars in increased bandwidth and enhanced cyberse-
curity tools to fend off the AI bots that are causing them to lose
revenue.
We cannot continue to allow these stealth crawlers to weaken local jour-
nalism, a sector critical to democratic governance. New York State has a
compelling interest in cracking down on these automated news scrapers to
preserve local journalism, safeguard digital infrastructure, and ensure
fair competition within its jurisdiction. The New York Stealth Crawler
Prohibition Act would, thus, make it unlawful to deploy unauthorized
stealth crawlers in a manner that would damage, impair or burden the
operation of a covered news site or otherwise cause the news site
economic harm.
 
LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:
This is a new bill.
 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:
To be determined.
 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This bill shall take effect on the ninetieth day after it shall have
become law.