> They don't even have the legal right to use images posted online just because they're accessible. They are protected by copyright unless CC or public-domain l

> They don't even have the legal right to use images posted online just because they're accessible. They are protected by copyright unless CC or public-domain licensed... I'm not sure what the legal situation is exactly but it seems to be more complicated than that. The LinkedIn case appears to have determined that scraping public content is legal. I don't think you can redistribute it after that but I guess you can freely analyze it? As to distributing (possibly even selling) the result of that analysis, see the GitHub Copilot controversy. There are large OCR datasets of public domain books and old governmental records that come with a "no commercial use" clause. I'm not sure what the legality of feeding those in to an ML algorithm that gets used commercially is.