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Well, what happens when Google releases Bard, their own ChatGPT for Search? Then we've got Google playing both sides of web scraping - both for link aggregation
by gjsman-1000 4y ago
Well, what happens when Google releases Bard, their own ChatGPT for Search? Then we've got Google playing both sides of web scraping - both for link aggregation and AI research (as though they weren't doing it for AI research anyway).
How do we legally differentiate that? Right now there is no legal differentiation as far as I can find. And an occasional verbatim paragraph or copied image does not overcome the "fair use" firewall in which intent (did ChatGPT intend to allow copyright infringement? Or is that just an occasional accident?) plays a huge factor. It almost brings back memories of Sony vs. Universal over whether VHS time-shifting was legal. The finding was that the device was legal, even though copyright-infringing use cases were possible and even likely.
You could argue that the internet, itself, would be a violation of similar standards. Tons of artists had their artwork posted online for profit without their permission in the early days. We worked through it and the internet wasn't declared illegal despite the abundance (and continued abundance) of copyright infringement. Even during the days of wild MP3 downloading, ISPs weren't legally considered enablers.
Yet another example I can think of - Photoshop. People who used Photoshop were culpable - but Adobe was never sued for making software that allowed celebrities to be digitally edited in horrific ways, or for copyrighted images to be remixed and edited en-masse. Intent matters - Photoshop clearly wasn't made with that intent, even though it is a possible outcome.