It seems to me that a more effective strategy would be for an entity like Reddit or Stackoverflow to initiate a lawsuit, as they may be able to better prove that their owned/user’s content was copied, terms of service were violated, etc.

Reddit, for one, is not about to do any such thing. They're clearly trying to cash out on the grounds that they are a giant source for AI companies, and they're fighting their own users who try to remove their content or gate it.

The courts have already ruled that web scraping is legal of the data is publicly facing. This is why price trackers for Amazon exist.

LinkedIn v. HiQ

In case anyone wants to read more about it - it’s very relevant today.

Interesting thing is that it is not legal everywhere in the world in such away. Fair use is a concept prominent in the US and not established in Europe (the datamining directive is a bit more limiting). Also the concept of informational self-determination does not really exist in the US despite the fact that the UN statements on human rights in the digital age clearly point in this direction. This is all 'wild west' to me as a European, but somehow I wonder if there is any guns that work to protect yourself by means of self-justice.

How does this work for data brokers? For example, if a data broker legally collects the data in the US, then sells it elsewhere, where it could not be legally scraped?

I think that generally if the customer hires you for something that is legal in general in their country, like price comparison, that they're fine if you employ means that wouldn't be legal for them, such as automated scraping, as long as it's legal for you.

The concept of informational self-determination ends when you put the information out in public... you self determine what is public and what isn't...

That's obviously not true. Legally, for example, both copyright and trademark protect public information from some kinds of use. In many places, artists also have moral rights: https://www.copyrightlaws.com/moral-rights-in-u-s-copyright-...

More importantly, the laws are representations of human feeling and social negotiation. Copyright law grew out of a complex array of beliefs and interests. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

It could be that the various "AI" generative models are legal under current law. But it could also be that this is one of those things, like the printing press, that causes people to say, "Hey, that's not right," and change the law to rule out something that was previously legal.

This is off topic but I found this phrase coming from a European hilarious.

"This is all 'wild west' to me as a European, but somehow I wonder if there is any guns that work to protect yourself by means of self-justice."

"Wild West" is a common way to refer to American-style business decisions in Germany.

I vaguely remember a Stern magazine cover from around 2004, depicting a giant cowboy boot with "GM" decorated with red, white and blue coming down on a crowd of people standing in the shape of the Opel logo and titled something like "Der Wild-West-Method."

It was clearly not a compliment.

(Correction: GM had owned Opel for decades at that point, but was getting more aggressive with how it was run)

In Norway, while we use "vill vest" (wild west) as well, we also use "Texas" as a synonym for "crazy". It's not necessarily negative ("that party was completely Texas" could imply it was crazy in a fun way depending on context) but it often is implying chaos and lawlessness.

> The courts have already ruled that web scraping is legal of the data is publicly facing.

And courts never overrule prior decisions...

Scribd data was not public facing, and even they don’t own the copyright to most of the books they have. maybe they created a scraper that got around their paywall?

If that’s all it takes to skirt copyright restrictions Aaron Schwartz should be rolling in his grave right about now.

OpenAIs Sam Altman is on Reddit’s board, no? Don’t think Reddit would be starting anything.

Next up, all content will be only viewable if you are signed in ala twitters change this morning.

> Don’t think Reddit would be starting anything.

The API changes and the ensuing chaos are at least in part because of OpenAI scraping Reddit’s content.

Since Altman is on their board, its moreso other companies that aren't OpenAI that would be effected? OpenAI got what it needed; has their own straw in the milkshake, make it more expensive for anyone else.

Purely conjecture obviously, but him being on both sides of that, not hard to see how all this becomes more favorable to his company making the moat wider for others.

OpenAI is both asking to raise the barrier to entry of LLMs and closing off the data sources that made them successful.

Sam is on record, and has even given lectures, stating the key to business success is monopolization.

It seems rather obvious under his perspective to do everything possible to restrict access to all information that could be used to train an LLM.

I understand Sam’s history with ycombinator gives him leniency around here but we seriously need to wake up to the fact that he’s attempting to monopolize the most powerful tool ever created. He talks a good game but if you pay attention to his actions it’s clear he is openly hostile towards the common good which he supposedly promotes.

I see him in the same regard as I see any oligarch vying for public favor by ‘stealing’ billions, donating a few million, and riding off into the sunset being praised by media for how much of the ill gotten gains he’s given back.

That's what Reddit executives say, but I don't think they're being truthful. Big significant AI players could be easily deterred by a mere terms of service change, or a modest rate-limit.

Instead they imposed an extremely abrupt new demand for money with any API call.

I don't know enough about it, but wasn't the getty images case about this?

Images are subject to copyright, which makes them different from facts about the world which aren't.

Facts about the world like the image that I have on my website, or other facts about the world like my blogposts? Or facts about the world like my source code?

any data that is available on the internet is not necessarily public. it might be mistakenly openly available, just like someone might leave their car door open.

also, hoovering up all available data on the net does not make them any less private

I have always wondered, is there legal precedent here? If someone were to ssh into your server without permission that's pretty obviously illegal access. But the web is just another protocol on another port, what makes it different?

I certainly never said Google could crawl my website, and I would be surprised if the presence of a robots.txt file is written into law as a requirement to prove you didn't want them on your web properties.

I feel like this must have been hashed out in lawsuits already, probably against search crawlers.

I'm too tired for a thorough search, but here's an article which states that an appeals court decided it's legal: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

IANAL and so on.

i m sure a lot of people lobbied for this to not be legislated

And I'm pretty sure you'd be wrong. For example, uploading a movie you don't have a copyright to to YouTube is illegal. That movie night be public data, but you don't have the permission of the copyright holder to copy that data.

Publicly accessible =/= You having the right to do whatever you want with something.

A French famous white hacker got condemned in French for publishing confidential information found through a Google search. The key thing in the case was that he undeniably aware that this was just a file server misconfiguration and that he wasn't supposed to be able to access it.

If you want more info about the case you should look for the "affaire Bluetouff*.

Leaving your car door open isn't a great analogy.

The internet is closer to leaving your own journal open at the library or a magazine store, and people going through it. You made it available for everyone to peek at in a public space. Maybe you didn't intent to leave it there, maybe you didn't intend to make it visible, but you did.

That is a fair analogy but still, me leaving it there doesn’t grant you the right to copy down what’s written in it and use it for something else.

your car can be parked in a public street

Indeed. Microsoft’s name and logo is published everywhere “in public” but you certainly can’t use them as your own.

IP is still IP even when it’s publicly available.

The operative term is not "private" it's "stolen".

But this is a nice setup for a straw man argument to distract people from the actual issue.

Not all data on the internet is permissively licensed and copy righted. ChatGPT being able to give opinions derived from a 1992 article on the fall of the soviet union from the NYT ... is debatably subject to copy right. However practically, the ship has sailed on ChatGPT. We're not going to legislate away AI.

Crypto seems to be circling the drain due to regulatory action, so I wouldn't be so skeptical about the power of the state to stifle things wants to.

Especially a state as aggressively draconian about copyright as the American government

Scrapping publically available personal informations, and keeping a database of it is already against GDPR and the likes, so it's not entierly unreasonnable. (Of course a LLM isn't exactly a database, but that'd likely be the main topic of the trial)

Exactly. How is this any different from how Google operates?

That in no way renders the data "definitely not private?"