> People want their data to be public
People don't want their data to be public. People want other people's data to be public. One's own data everyone thinks should be private and tightly controlled. This applies to people and businesses equally.
People don't want their data to be public. People want other people's data to be public. One's own data everyone thinks should be private and tightly controlled. This applies to people and businesses equally.
LinkedIn, likewise, has built its business model on an implicit contract with its users that it’s going to show their CV to anyone who asks for it.
I think LinkedIn users would be surprised that LinkedIn doesn’t let bots read (scrape) their public CV. A CV (individually, rather than in aggregate) is ultimately useful for only one thing: marketing the CV’s author’s skills. Why wouldn’t I want my marketable skills scraped into some private “talent matchmaking” agency’s databases, such that someone could find me—and hire me—when I show up as a result of some fancy OLAP query they paid that agency to run on their scraped data? It’s more roundabout than them just finding my CV on LinkedIn, but I’m still glad they found it!
I would point out that this is still possible (even probable!) without any bots being involved at all. Back before CVs were online, humans working for recruitment agencies would “scrape” information from local, physical job boards by hand into their company’s databases (where “database” here could just mean a filing cabinet.)
IMHO, the real solution to that is a spam filter (or an “agent”, in the old world.) Just because a lot of people want to talk to you, and most of them aren’t very interesting, doesn’t mean they need to be prevented from accessing you—they just need to be prioritized by interesting-ness, which is something you can do yourself, or hire a service to do for you.
LinkedIn is really really clear that:
- They won't share you information with 3rd parties
- You're not allowed to use information on LinkedIn for commercial purposes without their permission
- Other users can view your personal data
So, why would I expect random third party companies to be able to scrape and sell my personal information?
My personal information is there for the individual use of others, and for authorised use by recruiters (who are vetted/managed by LinkedIn).
I've chased down the convention spam mail I get using my GDPR rights, and surprise surprise, they got my details by scraping LinkedIn. That is absolutely not expected nor acceptable use of my data...
Let me put it this way: if I have a Wordpress blog, I’d certainly be miffed if Wordpress let bots see my drafts... but I’d also be miffed if Wordpress didn’t let bots (Google, for one!) see the published blog itself. It’s a blog; a public website! Anyone or anything with the URL is supposed to be able to retrieve the page! It’s not “my information” any more†; it’s been broadcast!
† You might want to mentally analogize to copyright, but I don’t think it’s the right model for the intuition people have here. Instead, try mentally analogizing to confidentiality. When a classified document is published in the public sphere (e.g. as evidence in a trial, as testimony before congress, etc.), this forcibly declassifies it. No matter how much the originator of the document might want to still keep it a secret, the legal protections of confidentiality don’t apply to it any more: it’s out there now. Anyone who reads it could plausibly have just read the public-sphere copy, so there’s no longer any way to charge people who have knowledge of the previously-classified information with any crime.
These are all my information, and selling them to marketing companies is definitely not archiving.
Would you be OK with a company scraping your blog and selling it?
Selling it how? If they put my blog posts in a book and try to sell that book, that’s copyright infringement. If they put my blog posts in an ML model corpus to train a translation service, and they then charge pay-per-use access to the resulting service... I don’t think I’d care, nor do I think there’s anything morally or legally wrong with that. If they scrape my name and phone number and generate a Yellow-Pages-like index from them? That’s explicitly allowed by law; and heck, that’s why I embedded the information onto my site in vCard microformat in the first place!
To put my philosophy succinctly: if web.archive.org can scrape your data without you having an explicit relationship with them granting them that right, then bad.evil.com can too. You can allow both (= publicizing your information), or neither (= protecting your information), but you can’t allow one but not the other. “Third parties you don’t have a relationship with, who access your data through the public sphere without entering into a specific licensing arrangement with you” are legally one big amorphous blob. You can’t make a law that splits that blob up, because it’s an opaque blob; in the ACL system that is contract law, all entities you don’t have contracts with are just one entity—“the public.” If you want some specific entities to have access to your information, that’s what protecting your data (= setting an ACL “the public = disallow”) and then explicitly licensing it out by entering into contracts (= setting an ACL “entity X = allow”) is for.
Examples where this is allowed:
- Images/media (Creative commons)
- Code (Open source licenses)
You say it isn't allowed for:
- Personal data
Unless I'm misunderstanding your philosophy (which seems to say copyright is OK, but public information must be public to all): You believe that it's morally OK for me to prevent a company selling my book, but not morally OK for me to prevent a company selling my name, job title and employer as a marketing bundle?
Edit: An aside, it's really confusing that you seem to be editing your previous replies minutes after I responded. I thought HN only let users edit during the "no replies" period?
Neither Creative Commons nor copyleft (nor copyright in general!) can assert anything about private use. IP rights are commercial rights; they affect sellers of your IP. They don’t affect end-consumers of your IP.
Note that even the GPL can’t force someone to publish the source of their GPLed-library-containing program, if they never publish the program itself, but only build it for their own private use.
Why? Because, by broadcasting the code of your GPLed library, you granted people an implicit use-right to it! Not a redistribution right; not a derivative-works right; but a use right. (If this wasn’t true, then people would be breaking the law by reading “common” newspapers in a cafe, or by listening to the radio, since they never entered into any explicit contract with the distributor/broadcaster.)
How does software licensing work, then? Mostly by 1. companies installing software on computers for their employees to use being considered IP redistributors; and 2. attachment of copyright through sampling when asset samples [e.g. brushes/textures in Photoshop] are distributed through the program. Other than that, there’s really no law forcing end-users to pay for software licenses. This is why e.g. WinRAR would never have been able to sue anybody. They published their shareware binary (without gating it behind a contractual relationship, like Adobe’s Creative Cloud installer); so now you have a use-right to it!
> You believe that it's morally OK for me to prevent a company selling my book, but not morally OK for me to prevent a company selling my phone number?
Copyright exists because your ability to make money from your own creative works hinges on your ability to exclusively license those works. If a publisher can get a redistribution license to your manuscript for free from a third party, why would they buy it from you?
You having exclusive access to your phone number does not make you money; others having access to your phone number does not deprive you of money you could have made by keeping that information private. Thus, there’s no advantage to introducing IP law into this domain (the domain of facts.)
There was a recent court case about someone creating a subway map by copying the raw data from existing subway maps, where the comments went deeper into this.
However, I'm really not sure how this is relevant to your moral stance on commercial use of "public" personal information.
Why do you believe it's reasonable to prevent unauthorized commercial exploitation of creative works, but not to prevent unauthorized commercial exploitation of personal information.
The former simply affects the small percentage of people who sell their works.
The latter affects the vast majority of the population who receive targeted spam, have their information collated and sold for profiling, are victims of identity fraud when those databases are inevitably leaked, etc.
For what it's worth, as I mentioned in my first comment, the GDPR absolutely gives me rights to control how my personal information is used. And the GDPR has a near total exemption for individual use.
What benefits do you see of commercial use against the wishes of the person that published it that outweigh the risks? (making money isn't a benefit)
My example of copyleft was specifically about the thing the Affero GPL tries to avoid (to unknown success): the possibility of someone using GPLed libraries to set up a commercial web service. Because they never release the binary, but only have people interact with it over the Internet, there’s no derivative work being made available in the commercial domain. So copyright doesn’t apply. Even though you’re a company making money off GPLed libraries!
>- Personal data
So there's a couple of things in play here. You can't (generally) copyright facts - "Cthalupa is a Rocket Surgeon for the Space Force since 2001", if true, would not be something that I could get a copyright on.
https://www.newmediarights.org/business_models/artist/are_fa...
The second thing is that terms have to be agreed upon by both parties. If you give me information without us coming to an agreement on terms, I can't be bound by them. If you just put a link to a TOS on your website and don't require people agree to it before giving them access to data on your website, we did not enter into a contractual agreement.
Actually even if they don’t sell it, but give it away, that’s still copyright infringement.
People put data places for specific purposes (to show recruiters) and want the ability to limit use to that purpose. How that's accomplished is just a technicality most people don't care about.
From a copyright perspective (since that's what LinkedIn's lawyers claimed): imagine if a newspaper sued another newspaper, saying that - not just the content of its paper - the information in the newspaper was copyrighted and could not be accessed by "unauthorized" third party companies. Either you print it, or you don't!