Reddit's Lawsuit Is a Dangerous Attempt to Expand Platform Power | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's Lawsuit Is a Dangerous Attempt to Expand Platform Power

serpapi.com

50 pointspaigealyse12 comments

So…if Reddit doesn’t own the content, it belongs to the user who posted it, then doesn’t this only harm Serpai’s case further?

I have posted to Reddit and I do not authorize any AI company to use my posts as training data.

Reddit isn’t trying to protect user content here. They’re suing to make sure they’re the only ones who can monetize it.

Not sure how you’d reach the conclusion that it would harm SerpApi’s case. They’re the ones being sued.

Is SerpApi asking each user for permission to use their posts if they are saying that the rights of the posts belong to the user?

Copyright protects copying. Scraping content does not violate copyright if the content is not republished. Otherwise Google and all search engines would be illegal.

Then you are free to sue whoever you think is violating your copyright. That's one of Serpapi's defenses: the owner of the copyright needs to sue, not a non-exclusive licensee of the copyright (Reddit).

This is a great legal defense, but if they are trying to make themselves seen as though they are fighting for the rights of the users and aren't doing the literal same thing that Reddit is doing, that is disingenious.

I wonder if any lawyers could weigh in here. Does this admission that they know the data is the user's make a class-action against SerpApi or whatever a slam-dunk? They're practically publishing their own admission of guilt!

It doesn’t hurt SerpApi’s defense against Reddit’s lawsuit, because SerpApi does not need to prove they have your permission. They only need to prove that Reddit does not have the legal authority to prevent SerpApi from scraping your content. Which they almost certainly don’t.

Previously, and on the Perplexity side:

Our Response to Reddit, Inc. vs. SerpApi, LLC: Defending the First Amendment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45739889

SerpApi: We're not scraping reddit's content, we're scraping user's content, therefore Reddit trying to stop us is bad for users

is that right? if so that's some real self-serving BS right there

I don't have a dog in this fight... but no.

Scraping publicly available content is not and has never been a copyright violation. As someone else pointed out in this thread, search engines wouldn't exist if that was the case.

But even if it was (which it's not) platforms like Reddit do now own the content. They can not be a gatekeeper to it. The person who posted the content owns it. They have legal standing to sue for copyright infringement, the platform does not.

This article is incredibly self serving, and they try way to hard to paint themselves as the defender of the little guy, but they are fundamentally correct. Reddit winning a case like this would mean every single content hosting website would now have a pathway to claim ownership over user generated content. It does not take someone with a law degree to see why that's a problem.

All this nonsense because of a silly law well past it's due date. Demolish copyright, and let's move on to a world where ideas worth sharing are shared without any blocking. And if someone feels their "ideas" should not be shared without their consent, well, they can keep it to themselves - we're a society after all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com