Conversations aside, laws can adapt to include terms regarding tagging. As said before, there are legal examples for this, eg. in the EU:
https://discoverdigitallaw.com/is-web-scraping-legal-short-g...
Quote:
the new law, that must be applied by all EU countries until 7 June 2021 (Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market or ‘DSM Directive’), in its Article 4 provides an exception from the rights of the database owner mentioned above in case of ‘reproductions and extractions of lawfully accessible works and other subject matter for the purposes of text and data mining’ unless ‘the use of works and other subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online’.
Again, I'm not a lawer, but to me that seems like it's up to lawmakers to do their homework, and update existing laws to deal with the reality that
a) data mining exists and is useful for lots of things
b) people want to make their works available publicly, and therefore ...
c) people publishing works need a workable, stable and reliable way to tell others whether they are okay with their work being scraped and used for analysis/training/etc. or not
And as I said above, ideally such a solution doesn't require mangling the published data in some way, and works for all kinds of data.
It should be. It'd be really great if it was. Sadly, lawyers wrote the DMCA. It has to be a measure which actually restricts access in an effective enough way, just saying "don't touch this" isn't a measure because it doesn't effectively prevent the usage. 17 USC § 1201(a)(3) and all that.
If training on image sets isn't copyright infringement, "don't use this" doesn't count. It's a license, and you're not infringing on it. If it is copyright infringement, "don't use this" is the default and you can't use anything without explicit permission, effectively requiring datasets to only include CC0 images. Since the first one is way more likely to be true, you instead use the 17 USC 1201(a) which prevents circumvention of technical protection measures, by creating what is hopefully a technical protection measure. Is it foolproof? It was never meant to be. It's an attempt at best. But it's better than relying on a law which is incredibly likely to never apply to dataset scraping.