Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

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If a Google employee working on this thing ever agreed to OpenAI's terms of service, they might be screwed.

From OpenAI's terms:

(c) Restrictions. You may not (i) use the Services in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates any person’s rights; (ii) reverse assemble, reverse compile, decompile, translate or otherwise attempt to discover the source code or underlying components of models, algorithms, and systems of the Services (except to the extent such restrictions are contrary to applicable law); (iii) use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI;

(j) Equitable Remedies. You acknowledge that if you violate or breach these Terms, it may cause irreparable harm to OpenAI and its affiliates, and OpenAI shall have the right to seek injunctive relief against you in addition to any other legal remedies.

Those two very clearly establish that if you use the output of their service to develop your own models, then you are in breach of the terms and they can seek injunctive relief against you (stop you from working until the case is resolved).

I hereby set a terms of service for everything I post on the internet from now on. OpenAI may not train future GPT models on my words or my code without my express written permission.

…

Somehow, I don’t think they’ll care.

Sure. If you can get everyone to create an account and agree to those terms before reading your comments, you might have a case.

Otherwise, it will be considered public information, at which point it is free to be scraped by anyone (see the precedent set by the LinkedIn/hiQ case).

LinkedIn won that case on appeal, HiQ waas found to be violating the ToS, common misconception

I was pointed at a link explaining the case here on HN, after trying to make a similar point, but cannot find the link currently

edit, not the one I was pointed at, but similar

https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...

That's just because they made accounts and so agreed to the terms right?

From your link:

>These rulings suggest that courts are much more comfortable restricting scraping activity where the parties have agreed by contract (whether directly or through agents) not to scrape. But courts remain wary of applying the CFAA and the potential criminal consequences it carries to scraping. The apparent exception is when a company engages in a pattern of intentionally creating fake accounts to collect logged-in data.

No, the case did not decide anything, no precedent was set. The point is that you cannot use this case to argue that you can scrape public data free of consequence

What's the legal status of such terms of service? Suppose you simply said "i didn't agree to these terms" - what's the consequence? It seems like the strongest thing they could legitimately do would be to kick you off of their platform. Simply writing "we can seek injunctive relief" doesn't make it so.

Wouldn't that only apply if that employee was acting as an agent of Google at the time?

Otherwise it would create an interesting dynamic that startups where no-one has created an OpenAI account would have a massive advantage, since they can freely scrape ShareGPT data and train on it while larger companies have enough employees that someone must have signed every TOS.

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