this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
128 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
85745 readers
3506 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Aww, did the serial copyright violator get copyright violated?
No, machine generated output is not eligible for copyright protection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Yeah, it wouldn't be copyright. It might be trade secrets, though. And trade secrets can be made out of public data, but arranged in a way that gives competitive advantage (for example, customer lists themselves might be trade secrets, even if each entry is a publicly available set of name/contact information/job title/company).
If a company voluntarily discloses a trade secret to a member of the public, it ceases to be a trade secret, so I doubt that would apply here either.
Sharing trade secrets under the terms of a contract that dictates how one can use the information still retains trade secret protections.
Without a contract: intentional disclosure to the person who receives it generally destroys the trade secret status of the information, because the "owner" of the information didn't do a good job trying to protect it.
With a contract: intentional disclosure to a person under the terms of the contract makes the contract's own protections of the information relevant, and misuse of the information by the recipient can get them sued under the contract. Plus, the information itself probably retains trade secret protection so that even if that person gives the information to a third party who can't be sued under a contract they never agreed to, there are still rights to protect that trade secret as property.
I'd be shocked if any paid API use isn't under a robust, enforceable contract. The only question is whether the contract language itself effectively prohibits distillation.
Depends on the agreement. Contracts (like EULAs) can cover a fair bit
EULAs aren't legally binding in sane countries.
Can you name a country where signing up for a paid account to an online service, and using the service and paying the invoice that comes in, doesn't form a legally binding contract between the customer and the vendor?
Most countries in the EU don't allow for consumer rights to be overridden by an EULA.
Similarly, I can't have a contract with you to murder me. It's illegal and me being a willing participant in it does not make it legal, even if I sign a contract.
An EULA is legally binding, but only the parts that aren't in conflict with consumer rights, meaning most of any EULA is going to be invalid.