6 ms·

How dare they use things freely available to everyone on the planet?!? The nerve!

JohnFen 3y ago
You take a derisive tone, but there is a violation of expectations here for a lot of people. All of the stuff I've put on the web, I put there for actual people to use. Crawlers and scrapers came around, and while I certainly didn't like it or approve of it, it was something I put up with. The only defense against it was to stop putting things on the web entirely, which seemed like an overreaction. Now, however, the use of that data to train AI (something that I consider actively harmful to society in general and don't want to support in any way), is a degree too far in the pot that's been slowly coming to a boil. While I do want to give back and contribute to the larger body of work available to people, I want it to be available to actual people. I don't want it to be available for training AI. I don't see why that's such a ridiculous stance. However, it's not legally possible to both make a work available to the public and prevent that work from being available for other uses. That's a real shame, and that the only protection available to me is to no longer have the works available publicly, it's loss to everybody.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  Is... any of that coded in law somewhere or illegal? "I don't want it to be available for training AI" is a perfectly reasonable personal preference. We can discuss whether it's selfish or not, whether others agree or not, etc. But this is a lawsuit. What makes it illegal for OpenAI to use your content? Like, is there some license you've put up on your content that disallows it? Is there anything that's relevant to the case at hand?
  - imchillyb 3y ago
    > https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security/childrens-privacy https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security/child... > The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids. The COPPA Rule puts additional protections in place and streamlines other procedures that companies covered by the rule need to follow. The COPPA FAQs can help keep your company COPPA compliant. Learn about the COPPA Safe Harbor Program and about organizations the FTC has approved to implement safe harbor programs. You can also get information about ways to get verifiable parental consent– including new methods the Commission has approved – and the process for seeking approval for new methods. There's one. There are similar laws in Europe. The AI scraped, utilized, kept, keeps... data on children. Parents did not consent. Children /can't/ consent. The AI use of such data is not only illegal but could end up with people being jailed over it.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      I assume the parents consented to have that information on a website, or it couldn’t have been scraped in the first place. They may be suing the wrong party here.
      - martin8412 3y ago
        The kids could have done so without the consent of their guardian. It cannot be used, unless consent is given beforehand.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I never said it was illegal. I was responding to the implication that because you put something publicly on the web, it's somehow ridiculous to object to certain uses of it. As to the legality, that remains unknown until a court makes a ruling. I suspect that this lawsuit will go nowhere, but I'm just speculating along with everyone else.
    - signatoremo 3y ago
      Of course as the data’s owner you can object to anything. Who is to say that you are not allowed to hate certain practice? On the other hand, you can’t prevent people from using your data if you put it out in public without condition (in the form of some acceptable licenses). As an analogy, if you put a picture of your living room in the sidewalk, you can’t prevent me from looking at it, study it, when I walk by. I may even benefit from it by copying your style or decoration. You may however cover it, with a warning. I’d clearly violate your terms if I still look at it against your will, although I may not violate any laws.
      - __loam 3y ago
        The problem is that a lot of that public data is protected by copyright.
        amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        It’s not obvious to me that using public data to train AI is a violation of copyright. Many are claiming it is, but as far as I know the courts haven’t weighed in on it yet.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    One could argue copyright, but you’d have to prove this was copyright infringement. Which I don’t believe the law has caught up with the answer to that.
  - ForestCritter 3y ago
    Medical data and data about children have very specific protections. The article says these were accessed without permission. If a lab tech dropped my lab results on the floor and you picked them up, it would not give you the right to store and use my information.
    - xen2xen1 3y ago
      How were they accessed without permission if they were protected? Is that the fault of the AI folks, or those sworn to protect the information? Unfortunate and bad, but if it's up there in the open I'm more worried about the fact that's it's available than the fact that an AI scraped it. If an AI can figure it out, so can multiple bad actors.
      - martin8412 3y ago
        The data can have been leaked illegally and put on the internet. That doesn't mean you can use it. As an EU citizen, some random company can't use PII related to me if I don't give consent or revoke my consent. They'll have to remove it or face a huge fine. The law doesn't care about the cost for your company to comply.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - diffeomorphism 3y ago
    What makes it legal? If you find code on GitHub without a license, then this does not mean "public domain". It means "the author has given permission for you to view this, but nothing more". Arguably using it for training counts as "more". So my question would be "what license entitles OpenAi to use my content"? It could be that as part of the user agreement of the website you gave some rights to the website and they sold it on to OpenAi, could be fair use, could be "does not count as 'more'",... . Bad analogy: For money laundering we have similar rules. If you suddenly appear with a large amount of money/data, then the obligation is on you to show that it is clean, not on others to show that it is dirty. You can disagree with that (innocent until proven guilty etc.), but it is not clear cut which way around things should be.
- supermatt 3y ago
  > it's not legally possible to both make a work available to the public and prevent that work from being available for other uses That’s bullshit. Copyright still applies to property available to the public. Maybe you are confused between “available to the public” (access) and “in the public domain” (copyright). Listening to a song on the radio doesn’t give you the right to copy it and sell it. You can say the same for other forms of IP. Trademarks, logos, etc are all “available” to the public, but they are still protected IP. When you post to a public website, you are giving access to that content , and (usually) legally giving rights to the website to publish your content. Those rights don’t transfer to a 3rd party.
reaperducer 3y ago
How dare they use things freely available to everyone on the planet?!? The nerve! You mean like all those credit card and other databases that keep getting left on public endpoints on AWS?
BizarreByte 3y ago
Well tell me how I license things I produce so that humans use them, but it's illegal for companies like OpenAI to use them, or more broadly, not legal to use in any dataset. I'm not okay with things I create (written, photos, etc) being used by these companies in datasets.
- orev 3y ago
  You attach a copyright statement that says pretty much what you just said. The tricky part is finding the infringement and paying the legal fees to pursue violations.
canadianwriter 3y ago
Not sure what you are implying here - just because something is free doesn't mean you can use it in a commercial product....
- myshpa 3y ago
  What about search engines? If you post something to the public internet, you lose privacy ... that's how internet works. For this we have robots.txt and authentication ... if a site allows you to browse their content, it's free to take, whatever the purpose.
  - orev 3y ago
    Search engines have a special legal carve-out, but otherwise granting access to browse a site ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT mean you have any rights to take it and do whatever you want with it. In the US, all works are automatically granted a copyright with all rights reserved, and the owner can choose to relax or waive those rights at their discretion, which most blog/social media posts, etc. do not waive those rights.
    - myshpa 3y ago
      - Crawl Limitations: Search engines typically adhere to guidelines provided by website owners through the robots.txt file. This file instructs web crawlers on which parts of a website they are allowed to access and index. Website owners can use these instructions to control the extent to which search engines crawl and display their copyrighted content. - Indexing vs. Displaying: Search engines primarily index web pages to create a searchable database of information. They do not generally host or display full copyrighted content directly. Instead, search results usually provide brief snippets, page titles, and links that direct users to the original source. This approach aims to respect copyright by driving traffic to the copyright holders' websites. - Fair Use Considerations: In some cases, search engines may display limited portions of copyrighted content under the fair use doctrine, which allows for the limited use of copyrighted material for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, or educational purposes. The application of fair use can be subjective and depends on the specific circumstances of each case. Replace "search engine" with "LLMs", it's (practically) the same.
tj-teej 3y ago
If a business hired a hundred people to go to a soup kitchen to get free soup and then went out and sold the soup surely that seems wrong. PS - these comments are going to be used to train the next GPT aren't they?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  The bigger problem is: why is the labor to buy the soup cheaper than selling the free soup? But I digress. This is more about selling an app with locations to soup kitchens. The kitchens may not have explicitly given permission to be used in the app, but their business location is public knowledge and not expected to be hidden.
- frakt0x90 3y ago
  This analogy is not applicable. Taking the soup deprives those who need it. Scraping the internet does not change that data's availability. Further the models add value on top of the data... They're not just reselling what they scraped.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    nobody "scrapes" soup kitchen soup because it's impractical/expensive/not worth it to do that. Not so with webcrawlers, large numbers of them can, at low cost to the scrapers, use all of your servers' resources, and in Amazon's case, use it to work against your business. When a person goes to Amazon and looks at what is splashed on the page, there are any number of chances that they will click "Buy!" on any one of them, and winning that lottery is Amazon's business; when a crawler does, it does more "looking" with no chance of purchase, and the data is then used to reduce the value of Amazon's lottery game. I'm not arguing whether or not crawling is or should be legal, simply saying the "it's not theft because it's copying" argument is inadequate to the task.
    - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      The fact that you’re trying to use Amazon to convince others that its somehow a negative to use web scrapers is just sad. I’m sure they don’t like it, and that’s in part of why I like them. Amazon is inherently anti-consumer, and uses every single thing it can to advertise to and/or profit off of you. Their 1984-inspired “security” and home automation systems, their app/website, their policies are all meant to take your money. Which is why web scrapers like CamelCamelCamel are good, because with all of this anti-consumer garbage Amazon shoves at you, you have the power to turn the tables and pick up what you need at the price you want. The only time I’ve heard scrapers/indexers being a problem is Bing was terrorizing someone’s website, so they just banned every Google/Bing/Yahoo IP. A problem that $1.3T companies don’t have. You can claim that “its not theft because it’s copying” is inadequate, but I would say the same about your own argument. Because there is no good argument against scraping data. It’s the only way to have a free Internet.
macksd 3y ago
Do you mean freely available in a technical / security sense, or legal / financial sense?

You take a derisive tone, but there is a violation of expectations here for a lot of people. All of the stuff I've put on the web, I put there for actual people to use. Crawlers and scrapers came around, and while I certainly didn't like it or approve of it, it was something I put up with. The only defense against it was to stop putting things on the web entirely, which seemed like an overreaction. Now, however, the use of that data to train AI (something that I consider actively harmful to society in general and don't want to support in any way), is a degree too far in the pot that's been slowly coming to a boil. While I do want to give back and contribute to the larger body of work available to people, I want it to be available to actual people. I don't want it to be available for training AI. I don't see why that's such a ridiculous stance. However, it's not legally possible to both make a work available to the public and prevent that work from being available for other uses. That's a real shame, and that the only protection available to me is to no longer have the works available publicly, it's loss to everybody.

NikolaNovak 3y ago
Is... any of that coded in law somewhere or illegal? "I don't want it to be available for training AI" is a perfectly reasonable personal preference. We can discuss whether it's selfish or not, whether others agree or not, etc. But this is a lawsuit. What makes it illegal for OpenAI to use your content? Like, is there some license you've put up on your content that disallows it? Is there anything that's relevant to the case at hand?
- imchillyb 3y ago
  > https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security/childrens-privacy https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security/child... > The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) gives parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids. The COPPA Rule puts additional protections in place and streamlines other procedures that companies covered by the rule need to follow. The COPPA FAQs can help keep your company COPPA compliant. Learn about the COPPA Safe Harbor Program and about organizations the FTC has approved to implement safe harbor programs. You can also get information about ways to get verifiable parental consent– including new methods the Commission has approved – and the process for seeking approval for new methods. There's one. There are similar laws in Europe. The AI scraped, utilized, kept, keeps... data on children. Parents did not consent. Children /can't/ consent. The AI use of such data is not only illegal but could end up with people being jailed over it.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    I assume the parents consented to have that information on a website, or it couldn’t have been scraped in the first place. They may be suing the wrong party here.
    - martin8412 3y ago
      The kids could have done so without the consent of their guardian. It cannot be used, unless consent is given beforehand.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I never said it was illegal. I was responding to the implication that because you put something publicly on the web, it's somehow ridiculous to object to certain uses of it. As to the legality, that remains unknown until a court makes a ruling. I suspect that this lawsuit will go nowhere, but I'm just speculating along with everyone else.
  - signatoremo 3y ago
    Of course as the data’s owner you can object to anything. Who is to say that you are not allowed to hate certain practice? On the other hand, you can’t prevent people from using your data if you put it out in public without condition (in the form of some acceptable licenses). As an analogy, if you put a picture of your living room in the sidewalk, you can’t prevent me from looking at it, study it, when I walk by. I may even benefit from it by copying your style or decoration. You may however cover it, with a warning. I’d clearly violate your terms if I still look at it against your will, although I may not violate any laws.
    - __loam 3y ago
      The problem is that a lot of that public data is protected by copyright.
      - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        It’s not obvious to me that using public data to train AI is a violation of copyright. Many are claiming it is, but as far as I know the courts haven’t weighed in on it yet.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  One could argue copyright, but you’d have to prove this was copyright infringement. Which I don’t believe the law has caught up with the answer to that.
- ForestCritter 3y ago
  Medical data and data about children have very specific protections. The article says these were accessed without permission. If a lab tech dropped my lab results on the floor and you picked them up, it would not give you the right to store and use my information.
  - xen2xen1 3y ago
    How were they accessed without permission if they were protected? Is that the fault of the AI folks, or those sworn to protect the information? Unfortunate and bad, but if it's up there in the open I'm more worried about the fact that's it's available than the fact that an AI scraped it. If an AI can figure it out, so can multiple bad actors.
    - martin8412 3y ago
      The data can have been leaked illegally and put on the internet. That doesn't mean you can use it. As an EU citizen, some random company can't use PII related to me if I don't give consent or revoke my consent. They'll have to remove it or face a huge fine. The law doesn't care about the cost for your company to comply.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  What makes it legal? If you find code on GitHub without a license, then this does not mean "public domain". It means "the author has given permission for you to view this, but nothing more". Arguably using it for training counts as "more". So my question would be "what license entitles OpenAi to use my content"? It could be that as part of the user agreement of the website you gave some rights to the website and they sold it on to OpenAi, could be fair use, could be "does not count as 'more'",... . Bad analogy: For money laundering we have similar rules. If you suddenly appear with a large amount of money/data, then the obligation is on you to show that it is clean, not on others to show that it is dirty. You can disagree with that (innocent until proven guilty etc.), but it is not clear cut which way around things should be.
supermatt 3y ago
> it's not legally possible to both make a work available to the public and prevent that work from being available for other uses That’s bullshit. Copyright still applies to property available to the public. Maybe you are confused between “available to the public” (access) and “in the public domain” (copyright). Listening to a song on the radio doesn’t give you the right to copy it and sell it. You can say the same for other forms of IP. Trademarks, logos, etc are all “available” to the public, but they are still protected IP. When you post to a public website, you are giving access to that content , and (usually) legally giving rights to the website to publish your content. Those rights don’t transfer to a 3rd party.

reaperducer 3y ago

How dare they use things freely available to everyone on the planet?!? The nerve! You mean like all those credit card and other databases that keep getting left on public endpoints on AWS?

BizarreByte 3y ago

Well tell me how I license things I produce so that humans use them, but it's illegal for companies like OpenAI to use them, or more broadly, not legal to use in any dataset. I'm not okay with things I create (written, photos, etc) being used by these companies in datasets.

orev 3y ago
You attach a copyright statement that says pretty much what you just said. The tricky part is finding the infringement and paying the legal fees to pursue violations.

canadianwriter 3y ago

Not sure what you are implying here - just because something is free doesn't mean you can use it in a commercial product....

myshpa 3y ago
What about search engines? If you post something to the public internet, you lose privacy ... that's how internet works. For this we have robots.txt and authentication ... if a site allows you to browse their content, it's free to take, whatever the purpose.
- orev 3y ago
  Search engines have a special legal carve-out, but otherwise granting access to browse a site ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT mean you have any rights to take it and do whatever you want with it. In the US, all works are automatically granted a copyright with all rights reserved, and the owner can choose to relax or waive those rights at their discretion, which most blog/social media posts, etc. do not waive those rights.
  - myshpa 3y ago
    - Crawl Limitations: Search engines typically adhere to guidelines provided by website owners through the robots.txt file. This file instructs web crawlers on which parts of a website they are allowed to access and index. Website owners can use these instructions to control the extent to which search engines crawl and display their copyrighted content. - Indexing vs. Displaying: Search engines primarily index web pages to create a searchable database of information. They do not generally host or display full copyrighted content directly. Instead, search results usually provide brief snippets, page titles, and links that direct users to the original source. This approach aims to respect copyright by driving traffic to the copyright holders' websites. - Fair Use Considerations: In some cases, search engines may display limited portions of copyrighted content under the fair use doctrine, which allows for the limited use of copyrighted material for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, or educational purposes. The application of fair use can be subjective and depends on the specific circumstances of each case. Replace "search engine" with "LLMs", it's (practically) the same.

tj-teej 3y ago

If a business hired a hundred people to go to a soup kitchen to get free soup and then went out and sold the soup surely that seems wrong. PS - these comments are going to be used to train the next GPT aren't they?

johnnyanmac 3y ago
The bigger problem is: why is the labor to buy the soup cheaper than selling the free soup? But I digress. This is more about selling an app with locations to soup kitchens. The kitchens may not have explicitly given permission to be used in the app, but their business location is public knowledge and not expected to be hidden.
frakt0x90 3y ago
This analogy is not applicable. Taking the soup deprives those who need it. Scraping the internet does not change that data's availability. Further the models add value on top of the data... They're not just reselling what they scraped.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  nobody "scrapes" soup kitchen soup because it's impractical/expensive/not worth it to do that. Not so with webcrawlers, large numbers of them can, at low cost to the scrapers, use all of your servers' resources, and in Amazon's case, use it to work against your business. When a person goes to Amazon and looks at what is splashed on the page, there are any number of chances that they will click "Buy!" on any one of them, and winning that lottery is Amazon's business; when a crawler does, it does more "looking" with no chance of purchase, and the data is then used to reduce the value of Amazon's lottery game. I'm not arguing whether or not crawling is or should be legal, simply saying the "it's not theft because it's copying" argument is inadequate to the task.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    The fact that you’re trying to use Amazon to convince others that its somehow a negative to use web scrapers is just sad. I’m sure they don’t like it, and that’s in part of why I like them. Amazon is inherently anti-consumer, and uses every single thing it can to advertise to and/or profit off of you. Their 1984-inspired “security” and home automation systems, their app/website, their policies are all meant to take your money. Which is why web scrapers like CamelCamelCamel are good, because with all of this anti-consumer garbage Amazon shoves at you, you have the power to turn the tables and pick up what you need at the price you want. The only time I’ve heard scrapers/indexers being a problem is Bing was terrorizing someone’s website, so they just banned every Google/Bing/Yahoo IP. A problem that $1.3T companies don’t have. You can claim that “its not theft because it’s copying” is inadequate, but I would say the same about your own argument. Because there is no good argument against scraping data. It’s the only way to have a free Internet.

macksd 3y ago

Do you mean freely available in a technical / security sense, or legal / financial sense?