There’s a lot of precedent here showing scrapping isn’t guaranteed to be acceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur....
$79,640.50 in compensatory damages + $39,796.73 discovery sanction
I could go on, but I am not sure what exactly you’re trying to argue here.
>I could go on, but I am not sure what exactly you’re trying to argue here.
That public is public. If you leave the door open in the real world, someone CAN enter your home. If you host your image on a public webpage, they can scrape it. robots.txt is not a security measure, nor is it a contract that magically gives the right to scrape where it wasn't given previously, it is a gentleman's agreement that you can ignore if you want to be a dick about it, and know about the robots.txt. Ethically, that's wrong, but it is how it is.
Not to mention, as I came to understand while reading during this discussion, LAION wasn't even crawling: they were using a public commoncrawl dump to gather their images. commoncrawl had crawled the author's site previously. They just took that data and got image links out of it.
1. they weren't selling a dataset
2. the artist didn't "disable" scraping in any meaningful way, legally
3. linking to the image is not illegal, and they're justified to respond with an invoice in Germany to recover legal fees for this dumb copyright complaint
4. it may fall under fair use to download images and train neural nets on them, it may not be. it always depends on the context and the specific case.
pretty simple stuff.
No trespassing signs have legal weight even without a fence.
Read up on Thomson Reuters v Ross Intelligence.
It's been determined that it's legal, if it's publicly accessible, and you don't receive a cease-and-desist letter telling you to stop. If it's public, that's permission. Simply "turning off scraping" by putting a robots.txt there doesn't make the content and linked images of a public web page any less public and restricted from being scraped, legally.
Just last year, the LinkedIn case: LinkedIn had a robots.txt, and the judge didn't give a fuck. Nor did he care what their terms of use said. Rather, it was hiQ's continued scraping of LinkedIn data even after LinkedIn's cease-and-desist letter to them that constituted access of data "without authorization."
>As to making a copy with intent to X, that’s what fair use is.
Yes, and?
>This distinction may seem crazy to you
It's not a crazy distinction, that's what I'd basically said previously, so perhaps we're talking past each other.