News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI s... by HWR_14 on Saturday February 14, 2026 @11:09PM (#47020976)
The main issue is a well behaved AI company won't be singled out for continued access, they will all be hit by public sites blocking AI access. So there is no benefit to them behaving.
Re:News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI s... by CrossVR on Sunday February 15, 2026 @12:49AM (#47021376)
Why should a well-behaved AI company be singled out for continued access? If the industry can't regulate itself then none deserve access no matter if they're "well-behaved".

Receiving a response from someone's webserver is a privilege, not a right.

Re:News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI s... by goku12 on Sunday February 15, 2026 @05:39AM (#47022696)
Honestly, has any of these AI companies ever offered a compensation for the data they pillage, except in case of large walled up information silos like reddit? This is like asking why the occasional burglars are not singled out for direct access into your house, compared to the stripmining marauders out there.

Why does any of them deserve any special treatment? Please don't try to normalize this reprehensible behavior. It's a greedy, exploitative and lawless behavior, no matter how much they downplay it or how long they've been doing it.

Re:News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI s... by miki123211 on Sunday February 15, 2026 @08:23AM (#47023466)
No single piece of content (unless you're a really large website) is worth the paper that such a contract would be written on.

This is the problem with AI scraping. On one hand, they need a lot of content, on the other, no single piece of content is worth much by itself. If they were to pay every single website author, they'd spend far more on overhead than they would on the actual payments.

Radio faces a similar problem (it would be impossible to hunt down every artist and negotiate licensing deals for every single song you're trying to play). This is why you have collective rights management organizations, which are even permitted by law to manage your rights without your consent in some countries.

Re:News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI s... by AnthonyMouse on Sunday February 15, 2026 @03:24PM (#47027191)
> So there is no benefit to them behaving.

That's assuming they're deriving a benefit from misbehaving.

There is no benefit to immediately re-crawling 404s or following dynamic links into a rabbit hole of machine-generated junk data and empty search results pages in violation of robots.txt. They're wasting the site's bandwidth and their own in order to get trash they don't even want.

Meanwhile there is an obvious benefit to behaving: You don't, all by yourself, cause public sites to block everyone including you.

The problem here isn't malice, it's incompetence.