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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

Ah you mean like Google Search?

Google doesn't "vaccuum up" anything. Every site indexed by Google is still available without using Google at all. They are _copying_ information, not moving or removing it.

And how does downloading a torrent differ from that?

It does not, and both uses are fine.

The sites copied by Google Search explicitly allow it.

The books copied by Meta, explicitly disallow it, and require payment for distribution.

Information wants to be free.

Perhaps. However, information won't be produced, if the already tenuous financial positions of authors is removed.

Things should be free, as in speech, not as in beer. Especially in this case. The giants of Silicon Valley could in fact purchase these rights.

Few authors care about people personally enjoying a product through otherwise means. They do care about mass distribution without attribution, without royalty, and without regard.

Information isn't copyrightable, at least in the US. Only creative works. But I get what you are saying.

That's fine and dandy as part of a free as in beer ethos. When 'information' wants to pad the quarterly earnings statement of a gigantic corporation that exists only by grinding the suffering of fellow humans into a fine marketable paste I am somewhat less sympathetic. Information should be free. To people, for non-commercial use.

The sites indexed often don't explicitly allow it. I can see my website in the index of web search engines that I never opted in to.

I'm not unhappy about it; but was never consulted.

Linking is different from copying, and fortunately the last case I remember allows it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticketmaster_Corp._v._Tickets.....

Tell me you've never googled lyrics without telling me.....

Sources are linked below the lyrics though!

But how did can Google index a site without copying it to their servers?

It doesn't, unless the torrent later becomes unavailable. Then the AI trained with is the only "copy" left.

If anything, the law should require that they seed their training data so that the competitive landscape converges on actual technological innovation and not moat building through data destruction.

Google Search brings you traffic and revenue. LLMs do not.

See also how people have responded to google-snippets. When google search threatens to remove traffic or revenue, people get angry quite quickly.

I still own my content. Google links to it and sends me traffic. We both win. This sort of relationship is not present when my content is anonymously fed into a training model intended to be used to extract users before they are sent to me. And, yes, I am aware Google has pulled some cute shit with this definition, and when they do it then it's also bad.

> Google links to it and sends me traffic

Used to, but more recently it's probably LLM agents using Google not people. And even if it's not yet, it will be. Last time I searched for something on Google it messed up so bad I quickly returned to GPT-4o+search.

If that's the case, Google should go away. I use kagi and it works pretty well for me.

The answer to bad products is not to throw away the idea of people getting to control their own content.

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