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Comment by IYasha | Hacker News Reader

At least I could try writing something future-proof, in case this uncertainty changes. No one can be "entitled to" access everything they stumble upon. E.g. accessing restricted government resources is prohibited. I'm myself not a lawyer by any means, all I can do now is write something "Stop right there, machine scum!" in hope in the future this will do something.

Or we could agree on some industry standard for now, like robots.txt... which doesn't, of course, guarantee anything.

I wonder if EFF is working on something similar.

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I didn't work on the AI policy stuff at EFF, but the last time I remember this question explicitly coming up was in the Google Books case, where Google cited language model training as an example of a fair use of book scanning (more than a decade ago, when it wasn't yet obvious how powerful language models would become). I don't recall if EFF specifically endorsed that example, but we did support Google's overall position.

I'd estimate a decent chance EFF will say that there isn't a right under existing copyright law to restrict machines from learning from copyrighted works. Remember that EFF usually does not want copyright rights to be stronger. (Probably the most general way to put it is that EFF basically always wants new uses of creative works made possible by technology not to be governed by copyright -- to have their benefits accrue to users.)

(I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2020.)

Edit: you could look at Jaron Lanier's stuff for the opposing view; I don't know if he has any specific technical or legal proposals.

Thanks for the info. AFAIK, AI trainers try to use public domain literature and art, for now, but that's not really obligatory.

>E.g. accessing restricted government resources is prohibited.

Do you have that problem? That your code/art is accessible to the wider world when it shouldnt be? In that case it sounds more like a task for somebody with a security background then for someone with knowledge of copyright.

The truth is... .gov data is leaking here and there, but, if it's not the access that is punished, then it's the distribution... or knowledge. Which brings us to a VERY sensitive topic of knowledge. And thought crimes. /(o_o)\

I have zero compassion for attempts to push the ball down this spectrum. If you miss configured your server the answer isnt criminalizing more and more stuff. Its fixing your server config and access policy. Your configuration, your problem. There is nobody else to blame once you know its leaking.

While I can understand what you mean, that paves way to a different extremity: basically, "it's your fault your toaster was stolen - you didn't build safe enough house" argument.

What I am trying to assess, though, is the fact that "there's something that is not yours and the owner decides if you can have/copy/ML it". Not the fact that someone did. Or, if did, what would the consequences be.

If you leave it in front of your property next to the trash can without a pricetag then yes it absolutely is. Because people rightfully assume you are giving stuff away. We are not talking about "not safe enough", we are talking about you giving a copy to anyone who wants one. Nothing is stolen, you are handing stuff out and dont bother to check who you give it to.

Trying to skip over the admin to fix this missconfiguration and going straight to the lawyer is the attempt to externalize costs. Which is where the lack of compassion comes in. This is a shitty thing to do.

This is not a lawyer problem, nobody broke in, nobody took anything. You are giving stuff away. Go talk to an admin on how to only give your toaster to the people that you want to give it to.

You say that accessing restricted government resources is prohibited, but even this restriction has caveats. Famously, (New York Times Co v. United States) the federal government could not stop newspapers publishing stories based on classified documents they had obtained.

If they're restricted than how did a data crawler find them?

But that doesn't matter. For this topic we only care about the materials that are intentionally published to the open web, and the different ways those materials can be licensed.

You can't expect a data scraper that can access the same publicly available information as a regular visitor to somehow magically know the difference.

Misconfigured servers are 100% the fault of the admin.

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