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Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

Why is that hilarious? We developed an entire community, infrastructure, system, architecture, everything, from scratch, and provide access to something that never existed in the first place on the Internet. That's a significant key difference here.

This would be analogous to you thinking ancestory.com is "aptly hilarious" for arguing against someone just scraping their site for content.

What makes you think you should be entitled to drive by the very unique house that we built, and pointing right at that house and saying "I think I'll take that all of that for myself!"

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Because you fail to see the very obvious parallels to scraping. I’m not criticizing your business (I think you provide a valuable service) but your hypocritical stance on what forms of publicly available information are allowed to be gathered and repackaged.

Google’s original (and OpenAI’s) business model was also building a scraping infrastructure, system, and architecture, from scratch — and providing access to something that never existed in the first place.

It's completely perpendicular, not parallel.

Public safety communications are radio waves that are broadcasted and the ability to passively monitor them is enshrined in United States law. That is a massively key difference.

If I was sending data into your home from my infrastructure without any action from you whatsoever, and you were reaching up into the air and gathering it and repackaging it, AND the law said that I have no intellectual property rights to said data, then that's a whole different story.

Every time you use Google you benefit from scraping. Scraping is how the world works for the last 25+ years.

You are trying to draw a distinction between data that is pushed and data that is pulled, and maybe there is some economic argument there in terms of resource usage, but that is very context-dependent.

In UK listening to public radio broadcasts is illegal. I think this law is idiotic and ignore it. It seems you do too since there appear to be streams from UK on your site :)

Google benefits from legal scraping - ban them from robots.txt and they'll stop.

Please don't mix consensual and non-consensual scraping, the difference is huge.

You are scraping radio signals and selling it. It’s an exact parallel and if you fail to see this it is indeed hilarious.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

You realise web scraping is a legal right too?

Why is it ethical if you build upon other people's data, but unethical if others do it?

Nobody cares how valuable you think your service is. Who's the judge of what's entitled to scrape or not? If you think you're the judge, I find it somewhat arrogant.

It is even more hilarious that you defend a position that, to me, looks authoritarian and individualistic. Might not be your intention, but it's what I read.

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