How Writers' Bloc wants to get small publishers paid when AI steals their work

Hi, I’m media innovation journalist Ulrike Langer and you’re reading my weekly AI in media newsletter. Thank you for being here! If someone has forwarded it to you please subscribe and never miss any future post.

If you are a reporter, your articles are being stolen three ways at once: copied onto other websites (increasingly, AI-generated ones); scraped by AI crawlers that visit without paying for pieces of your work when they turn them into AI overviews; and absorbed into the training data of the models themselves. Writers' Bloc, a young Irish startup, wants to make sure you get paid on all three fronts. It gives every article a digital fingerprint the moment it's published. It watches the web and the AI models for your content. And when it catches a copy, it sends the infringer a bill. If they pay up, the theft converts into a license. 

Despite the name, nothing gets blocked here: Founder John Byrne considers locking out AI crawlers increasingly futile and instead wants to charge them a fair price. The “bloc” is the customers themselves, banded together as one negotiating party: freelance journalists, small publishers and niche B2B operations, the people who get scraped the most and paid the least (that would be people like me). Version one is built, pilots are starting in Ireland and the UK, and the waitlist is open. I questioned Byrne, an Irishman in Paris who came to publishing from film and music rights financing, about how the platform works, what it costs, and what it can't do yet. He showed me the prototype, and I'm signing up myself. Both links are at the bottom of this issue.

Writers' Bloc does three jobs. It proves who wrote what first. It catches copies wherever they surface. And it charges the AI bots at the door.

The first borrows from music. Shazam can identify any of the 40,000 recorded covers of the Beatles' "Yesterday" from a few seconds of audio, because every recording has a unique digital fingerprint. Writers' Bloc does the same for articles: Thousands of people cover the same topics, but writing style, vocabulary and structure make every piece unique. The fingerprint also folds into metadata and, if you choose, material from your editorial process that never got published — notes that a copycat can't have, so a stolen version looks conspicuously thin next to the original. Each fingerprint is then logged into a blockchain. Strip away the buzzword and it's a public, tamper-proof notary stamp: Who wrote what, and when, and who was first.

The second job is watching. The system monitors the web for copies, including the near-copies where someone reordered sentences or swapped words with a thesaurus. When it finds one, it shows you the evidence side by side.

Detecting whether an AI model was trained on your work is a harder problem because after training, nothing survives verbatim. Here Writers' Bloc fires batteries of test prompts at the models, which Byrne calls probes, and scores the answers across repeated runs. The result is a likelihood, and Byrne admits the limit: "We can't say 100 percent definitively yes or no."

The third job happens at the door. Instead of blocking AI crawlers, Writers' Bloc puts a payment gate in front of them, built on a payment standard called x402 that charges bots per visit in USDC, a so-called stablecoin. It is a cryptocurrency built to hold a fixed value of one dollar, which you cash out through services like Coinbase. Blocking, Byrne argues, is futile: "If you can't beat them, join them. Instead of blocking them, why not just monetize them?"

Why would AI companies ever pay? Byrne's answer is that we’ve seen this movie before. The music industry sued Napster into the ground, and piracy simply moved to Limewire and Pirate Bay. What ended mass music piracy wasn't litigation but iTunes and Spotify: a paid version of the same convenience. YouTube followed the same arc — sued over copyrighted uploads, it paid backdated settlements and signed licensing deals going forward. So did Roblox with music rights. Settle for the past, license for the future.

Publishing, Byrne argues, is at the settlement stage now. The lawsuits are piling up: In July, a US federal judge gave final approval to Anthropic's 1.5 billion dollar settlement with book authors, the largest copyright settlement in US history, over roughly 500,000 pirated books. Dozens of similar cases against AI companies are pending. If that settlement is the benchmark, Byrne's corporate-finance logic goes, paying licenses becomes the cheaper path. What's missing is the counterparty: someone who can bring the long tail of publishing to the table as one negotiating party. That's the job Writers' Bloc wants. The more journalists and publishers the bloc holds, the more weight it carries at the table.

Byrne's conviction that publishing will repeat music's arc comes from his own resume, none of it built in journalism. Byrne comes from sales and corporate finance, most recently at a boutique lending firm that financed film and music rights — his first close look at organized royalty systems. That's where he saw what organized royalty systems look like from the inside. "Hope isn't a business model," he writes about publishing's answer to content theft, and he told me he has spoken to more than 450 publishers, journalists and media operators while building the product.

The company is small: Byrne alone on the commercial side, a team of five contract developers in Marrakech who built version one. Writers' Bloc is bootstrapped; an application to Enterprise Ireland, the Irish state startup funder, is in progress, and one to Y Combinator is submitted. "Nail it, then scale it," as Byrne puts it.

The New York Times and Axel Springer negotiate their own AI deals; they have the clout. Byrne's customers are everyone below that line: small and mid-sized publishers whose content is valuable enough to steal, but who have no legal department to fight back with.” Small publishers are, in his words, "getting rinsed by these AI companies" without the money or time to fight back. To reach them, Writers' Bloc no longer signs up individual writers as its main customers and instead goes through member organizations: copyright and licensing societies, journalist unions, publisher associations. Two such organizations have verbally agreed to pilots starting in Ireland and the UK; Byrne can't name them yet.

Individuals can still join. When Byrne described his ideal user — niche content, specific audience, the kind of one-person B2B operation that platforms like Beehiiv and Substack have multiplied — I told him I'm Exhibit A. My two newsletters News Machines and News Maschinen have about 150 articles between them. That puts me in the individual journalist tier.

Byrne volunteered the gaps himself, so I'll list them the way he did. Version one is, in his words, "a little bit primitive." The enforcement and licensing layer behind the payment requests is still being built. No court that he's aware of has tested blockchain records as copyright evidence; his plan is to offer captured evidence to legal teams in pending AI lawsuits. But so far no legal team has worked with it. "That's my theory," he says. The training-detection score is a probability, never proof. And the guidance most users will want first, a realistic price to demand from an infringer, doesn't exist yet. A benchmarking exchange he calls "the Bloc," where members can compare their rates against others and against services like Cloudflare's crawler pricing, is on the roadmap, along with the security certifications (SOC 2, ISO) that larger organizations will demand.

There's a free tier to explore. The journalist tier costs just under 100 euros a year, the publisher tier about 996 euros. Anyone joining the waitlist before the end of 2026 gets founding-member terms: 90 percent off the first year, around 18 to 21 euros for a journalist, 50 percent off the second, and 25 percent off permanently. Byrne admits people off the waitlist one by one, deliberately: He wants a small first group whose feedback shapes the product before the member organizations arrive with thousands.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I will be a founding member and provide feedback to the platform improve early versions.  

Here is the waitlist: https://getlaunchlist.com/pages/writers-bloc

And here you can sign up to access the demo, a prototype filled with a fictional publisher's data: https://demo.writersbloc.eu/. Note that it deliberately includes features that aren't finished yet, like the Bloc benchmarking exchange, to show where the product is heading. That's also a useful way to read it critically: You can see for yourself what's built and what's still a promise.

Transparency disclaimer: How I use AI (click here for details).