4 ms·
> There's a big difference between scraping a website so you can direct curious people to it (Googlebot) and scraping a website so you can set up a new website
by astrange 2y ago
> There's a big difference between scraping a website so you can direct curious people to it (Googlebot) and scraping a website so you can set up a new website that conveys the same information, but earns you money and doesn't even credit the sources used (which these LLM services often do).
"Crediting the sources used" is not really a principle in copyright law. (Funny enough, online fanartists seem determined to convince everyone it is as a way of shaming people into doing it.)
Whether or not a use is transformative is protective though, and is what both of those cases rely on.
- roywiggins 2y agoYes, credit doesn't matter for copyright, but I'm more talking about why people are mad about some uses of scraping and not others. Legality aside, there is something very strange about a device that both 1) relies on your content to exist and could not work without it and 2) is attempting to replace it with its own proprietary chat interface. Googlebot mostly doesn't act like it's going to replace the internet, but Gemini and ChatGPT etc all are. They're announcing "hi we are going to scrape all your data, put it into a pot, sell that pot back to you, and by the way, we are pushing this as a replacement for search, so from now on your only audience will be scrapers; all the human eyeballs will be on our website, which as we said before, relies on your work to exist."