Re:Commons: Renewing the Digital Commons for Cultural Heritage

The digital commons — a heterogenous set of platforms and communities that steward openly licensed, digital resources that can be shared and reused to produce works of new cultural value — face an acute and largely unrecognised threat. Since 2022, and intensifying from 2024, cultural heritage institutions have experienced overwhelming automated bot traffic from Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies scraping data to train generative AI models. This activity disregards copyright licences and long-standing web protocols, inflicting distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)-scale infrastructural damage, raising engineering costs, degrading public access, eroding contributor trust, and decontextualising precious materials. Public costs increase, while the benefits of scraping flow overwhelmingly to a handful of private actors.  

This white paper synthesises findings from research conducted by the University of Edinburgh in 2026 as part of the ekip (European Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries Policy Platform) project. We draw on interviews and workshops with 115 cultural heritage stakeholders, along with analysis of the evolving European and UK policy landscape, to evidence the costs and burdens of AI-driven bot scraping on the digital commons and institutions’ mitigation strategies to maintain their infrastructure in response. Stakeholders express their willingness to share data with AI companies, but the combination of unsustainable traffic and lack of dialogue with bot originators leads them to reactive measures, such as bot-blocking firewalls. We argue that these defensive responses are quietly creating new enclosures that undermine the very openness that cultural heritage institutions seek to protect.  

This emergent strain on our public digital goods also presents opportunities to reimagine AI and the commons on more equitable terms. Drawing on stakeholders’ proposals and ideas, this paper offers recommendations on legal frameworks, technical standards, funding, governance and public-interest AI models. These recommendations all centre on a key requirement of keeping our digital commons infrastructure sustainable: content may remain free, but those utilising this infrastructure at industrial scale must be accountable and contribute to its sustainability. 

This white paper is written for policymakers working across innovation, AI, cultural and creative industries policy, for strategists within galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions), and other stakeholders operating within the digital commons ecosystem.