Hacker News Reader

Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

training is either fair use, or it isn't

OpenAI can't have it both ways

Right, but it was never about doing the right thing for humanity, it was about doing the right thing for their profits.

Like I’ve said time and time again, nobody in this space gives a fuck about anyone that isn’t directly contributing money to their bottom line at that particular instant. The fundamental idea is selfish, damages the fundamental machinery that makes the internet useful by penalizing people that actually make things, and will never, ever do anything for the greater good if it even stands a chance of reducing their standing in this ridiculously overhyped market. Giving people free access to what is for all intents and purposes a black box is not “open” anything, is no more free (as in speech) than Slack is, and all of this is obviously them selling a product at a huge loss to put competing media out of business and grab market share.

The issue here is breach of contract, not copyright.

Similar to how a patent contract becomes void when a patent expires regardless of what the terms of the contract says, it's not clear to me OpenAI can enforce a contract provision for an API output they own no copyright in.

Since they have no intellectual property rights in the output, it's not clear to me they have a cause of action to sue over how the output is used.

I wonder if any lawyers have written about this topic.

What makes you think they had a contract with them in the first place? You can use openAI through intermediaries/proxies.

I assume all those intermediaries have to pass on the same ToS to their customers otherwise that seems like a very unusual move.

It's quite unlikely that OpenAI didn't break any TOS with all the data they used for training their models. Not just OpenAI but all companies that are developing LLMs.

IMO, it would look bad for OpenAI to push strongly with this story, it would look like they're losing the technological edge and are now looking for other ways to make sure they remain on top.

Interesting that Trump signalled positively for deepseek. Said something like 'american companies need to wake up'. Has Sam not paid the piper yet?

How many thousands or millions of contracts has OpenAI breached by scraping data off of websites that have terms of service explicitly saying not to scrape data off their websites?

They can sure try though, and I would be damned surprise if this wasn’t related to Sam’s event with trump last week.

"Free for me, not for thee!" - Sam Altman /s

But in all reality I'm happy to see this day. The fact that OpenAI ripped off everyone and everything they could and, to this day pretend like they didn't, is fantastic.

Sam Altman is a con and it's not surprising that given all the positive press DeepSeek got that it was a full court assault on them within 48 hours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com