The Scribd founder built a marketplace where authors sell their books' AI rights - instead of suing over them.
THE MARK. A wordmark with a tiny human face, set on the company's yellow-to-teal gradient. In a market obsessed with machines, the logo keeps insisting on the other side of the transaction: the people who wrote the words.
There is a familiar way that industries meet a disruptive new technology, and it usually involves lawyers. Authors watched large language models digest what looked like every book ever written, and the reasonable reaction - the one now working its way through several courtrooms - was to sue. Suing is slow, expensive, and binary: you win or you lose, and either way the technology keeps improving.
Created by Humans is a bet that there is a third option sitting between "get scraped for free" and "litigate for years," and that the third option is a market. Founded in 2024 by Trip Adler - the co-founder and former CEO of the reading platform Scribd - the company runs a two-sided marketplace. On one side, authors and rights holders claim their works, by ISBN or direct upload, and set the terms under which an AI company may use them. On the other side, AI developers get a single place to browse and license premium content that has been, in the reassuring phrase, "legally cleared."
The elegant part, and the part that makes this a company rather than a manifesto, is that copyright gets unbundled. Instead of one all-or-nothing right, an author can license training rights, reference rights, and eventually transformation rights separately, and choose which AI companies to work with. That granularity is the product. It turns a fuzzy grievance - "the machines took my work" - into a set of discrete, priceable transactions, each with a check attached.
Adler frames the philosophy as a "Fourth Law," a nod to Asimov: humans should consent to AI using their work, be compensated when they ask, and be credited when referenced. It sounds like ethics. Read more carefully, it is a product spec. Consent is the opt-in toggle, compensation is the payment rail, credit is the attribution feature. The company has taken three principles that most of the industry agrees with in the abstract and, unusually, shipped them.
Whether licensing beats litigation is still an open question, and it is worth being honest that the answer depends on things Created by Humans does not control - court rulings, the willingness of AI labs to pay for what they might otherwise take, and how many authors decide a licensing dashboard is preferable to a lawsuit. But the company has assembled an unusually credible set of people who think the answer is yes.
Authors and rights holders claim their works by entering an ISBN or uploading directly.
Choose which rights to license and which AI companies you're willing to work with.
AI developers browse and buy legally cleared content through an automated interface.
A dashboard tracks where your work is used across models and what you've earned.
The right to include a work in the data that teaches an AI model. The foundational license, and the one at the center of most copyright disputes.
The right for a model to retrieve and cite a work at query time - the "look it up" use that puts a premium on accurate, cleared sources.
The right to build on a work's voice, style, or characters. The most creatively sensitive tier, slated for a later release.
Approximate; figures compiled from public reporting (TechCrunch, Fortune, PitchBook). Bars scaled for comparison.
Craft Ventures (David Sacks), Floodgate (Mike Maples), Garry Tan, Jason Calacanis / LAUNCH, Sam Lessin / Slow Ventures, and author-advisor Walter Isaacson.
Giant Ventures and Uncommon Capital, plus founders Emmett Shear (Twitch), Kyle Vogt (Cruise), Drew Houston (Dropbox), Cal Henderson (Slack) and Cameron Yarbrough (Torch).
Supply side: authors, publishers and creators who want to opt in - on their own terms - to AI use of their work and be paid for it.
Demand side: AI developers who want legally cleared, premium content in one place, rather than the legal risk of scraping. The public beta for book authors launched in January 2025 alongside the Authors Guild.
Emerges from stealth with a ~$5M seed round, backed by David Sacks, Garry Tan, Walter Isaacson and others, to help creators license work to AI models.
Launches its public beta AI licensing platform for book authors with the Authors Guild, alongside a $5.5M seed round. Covered by NPR, Fortune and Publishers Weekly.
Runs "AI Rights Licensing 101" education sessions with the Authors Guild to bring more writers into the market.
Trip Adler appears in interviews on whether copyright can survive the machine era and how creativity can thrive in the AI age.
Created by Humans is a San Francisco startup building a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators sell the rights to their work for AI training, reference, and transformation - and get paid for it. Founded by former Scribd CEO Trip Adler, the platform lets rights holders claim their books (by ISBN or upload), set the terms under which AI companies may use them, and track usage and payments, positioning licensing as an alternative to lawsuits between creators and AI developers.
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