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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Its even dumber when you consider AI model output was not considered copyrighted or eligible for copyright to begin with, as far as I know. How exactly would this even be "theft"?

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Plus on top of that it's been ruled that training on copyrighted material is allowed because it's transformative. As a result even if the model output is copyrighted training on it would be as allowed as training on books.

If this was ruled ok why are they paying billions to book publishers?

Because they pirated said books instead of buying them legally.

Yea to be more explicit than the other reply they are being fined for the theft of the books not training on them. They trained on tons of legally procured books by destructively scanning and OCRing them. It was discovered in legal filings and is called Project Panama if you want to read more about it.

I can't imagine Moonshot have found a way to completely bypass the subscription or api billing either. So those model outputs have been paid for! No theft of any kind!

At most they'd be getting more out of distributed use of subsidized plans and API than the ToS would prefer.

It’s theft because a lot of rich people have money on the line.

It’s not they, but it does break TOS.

As if scraping the entire internet doesn't break thousands of TOSes?

Yes, indeed! I have a site where 99% of the traffic is Claude. I could ban them but I don’t bother.

Better to feed them poisoned results...

I poison their requests with crap, particularly because they were the worst offenders for sheer request rate. The site has maybe a hundred pages, and I'd see them hit at a sustained 20 rps for weeks on end, same content being pulled over and over and over again. Easily handled by my small server as it's static content, but the sheer arrogance (inadvertent or otherwise) pissed me off.

I'm not sure if they caught on, or just finally started behaving better, but after months of being served crap in my never ending labyrinth of auto-generated junk, they have stopped.

My stuff is on Vercel, so it’s more of an issue as it uses up my limits. I’m moving to Cloudflare and I want to see how changes I make affect their bot, if at all.

Scrapping internet realistically does involve Botnets of all kind, the scrapping itself might be legal, but it's certain a ton of infected computers are routing traffic and being used as Proxy.

It's still the pot calling the kettle black.

steal from the rich -> theft

steal from the poor -> capitalism

pay the rich for their services then lawfully use what you paid for to compete with the rich -> national security issue?

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