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OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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There's actually legal precedent against scrapping a website through unofficial channels, even if the information is public. But basically, if you scrape a website and hinder their ability to operate, it falls under "virtual trespassing".
I'm assuming it would be even worse now that everyone is using the cloud and that scrapping their site would cause a noticeable increase in resource cost (and thus, directly cost them more money because of cloud usage fees).
It's why APIs are such a big deal. They provide you with an official, controlled, entry point to a platform's data.
It's the opposite! There's legal precedence that scraping public data is 100% legal in the US.
There are few countries where scraping is illegal though like Japan and China. European countries often also have things called "database protection" laws that forbid replicating public databases through scraping or any other means but that has to be a big chunk of overal database. Also there are personally identifiable info (PII) protection laws that protect storing of people data without their consent (like GDPR).
Source: I work with anti bot tech and we have to explain this to almost every customer who wants to "sue the web scrapers" that lol if Linkedin couldn't do it, you're not sueing anyone.
Refreshing to see a post on this topic that has its facts straight.
EU copyright allows a machine-readable opt-out from AI training (unless it's for scientific purposes). I guess that's behind these deals. It means they will have to pay off Reddit and the other platforms for access to the EU market. Or more accurately, EU customers will have to pay Reddit and the other platforms for access to AIs.