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Comment by niemandhier | Hacker News Reader

Should not be a problem in the EU. Article 3 and 4 of the „ Copyright in the Digital Single Market“ Directive already regulate this.

Summary by Wolters Kluwer: […] Everyone else (including commercial ML developers) can only use works that are lawfully accessible and where the rightholders have not explicitly reserved use for text and data mining purposes.

AFAIK they are discussing something like a robot.txt to flag stuff as „not for training“. You will probably be expected to implement some safeguards and of course the end user will have to be careful in his use of the generated things.

Source at Kluwers: https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/02/20/protecting-...

EU Legal Text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj

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The EU cannot agree that the Do Not Track flag on web browsers is legally binding but big content should be able to create legally binding flags on their websites to avoid scraping of data? Seems odd!

I don't think that's a fair analogy. One forces 99% of websites to make a change, while the other is something that would need to be done by the big companies doing the scraping.

A Do Not Track flag being legally binding would force small websites, e.g. a local restaurant website, to implement something they likely are not aware of and secondly do not technically understand.

A company that is mass scraping data for their AI model is much more likely to understand and respect that scraping the data has legal implications, and would be technically capable in implementing a scraping solutions that accounts for a robots.txt.

The X-Robots-Tags header already exists as "noai" and "noimageai". Scraping software like img2dataset respects these by default.

I'm gonna guess it often isn't even their content but is user content they are protecting. So, sounds like a big subsidy/protection racket for Twitter or whatever to train on their users' public content but not let others.

If I understand parent correctly, the restriction flag is opt-in? This turns copyright around completely, expecting every small content producer to implement something they likely are not aware of and secondly do not technically understand.

At very least robots.txt is from 1994; it has been part of the web almost from the start (web became public in 1991, so within 3 years).

Claiming ignorance here would be just a little bit disingenuous.

> Summary by Wolters Kluwer: […] Everyone else (including commercial ML developers) can only use

That is a weird (wishful?) interpretation. Doesn't article 4 give the exception to everybody for the purposes of text and data mining, including commercial ML developers?

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj

Seems like an accurate interpretation to me given that article 4 includes:

> The exception or limitation provided for in paragraph 1 shall apply on condition that the use of works and other subject matter referred to in that paragraph has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online.

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