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Comment by jm4 | Hacker News Reader

I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?

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> Why do we put up with it?

You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.

I actually do want to do something. I started to scrape Twitter to make it freely available. The web should stay open.

I am also doing something, by hosting one of the public instances of Nitter.

Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?

Yes, exactly. I limit the scraping to popular enough accounts. The wikimedia community is already organized to decide who deserves a Wikipedia page so I use that.

Please do share with the other instance operators in #nitter:matrix.org!

We put up with it mostly because it enables a lot of communication to happen at all.

You want to hold the corporations legally liable for the content their host, you can say goodbye to basically reddit as a whole, any twitter clone, youtube comment sections and a whole more stuff.

Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?

Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.

Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.

So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run

  mtr xcancel.com

I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?

No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.

Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.

I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.

Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.

> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?

Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.

Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).

So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.

> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.

Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.

There's the matter of linking to copyrighted works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...

If your link is set up to make the image display immediately (that is, you wrap it in image tags, or as in one case, embed Instagram posts) then you may be violating copyright. What's more, in Europe, just a hyperlink to a copyrighted work violates copyright.

Conclusion: copyright is not about copying, it's about access.

Sure, but that seems different from what I was addressing. The person I was responding to was saying that the law as a whole usually doesn’t make sense. They were saying that in the context of arguing that if the law didn’t consider viewing a page of copyrighted copying as involving copying due to the technical basis of it having to transfer bits to your computer then the law didn’t make sense. My point was that laws don’t have to encompass or fully specify all edge cases, and that the ways laws are written can be open to interpretation. I think I removed a sentence before posting about the purpose of finders of facts in the US system like juries or judges in bench trials.

> Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence.

I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.

> I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.

I have no idea at all how anything should matter as far as the law is concerned. Not my problem, unless I somehow get caught. But not getting caught is a problem grounded in reality, unlike legal ones. I think I can manage that.

That said, if laws about computers don't comport with how computers actually work, I'll take extra amounts of glee in violating them.

And, even more gleefully, nobody will be able to detect my violations. My internet traffic will look identically the same as someone "innocently copying" or whatever.

> I deliberately ignored it, because it was all irrelevant.

Attempting to have a discussion with someone who participates like that pointless.

It's not about "how things actually work", the law is there to regulate human activity. The law tends to call these copies on the wire, in RAM, in caches, etc. "transient copies", which is fine until a human starts using them as non-transient copies, e.g. saves them for later.

You could argue that your MP3 of Enjoy the Silence is actually just a big number, and you can XOR it with 0xFF and it's a completely different big number, and you just happen to XOR it with 0xFF when you want to listen to it. The courts would look past that, and instead determine if you created that "big number" by MP3-encoding the track from a CD you owned (legal), versus obtaining it from some file-sharing network (not legal)

Classic essay about techies not understanding the law: What Colour Are Your Bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.

It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.

The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.

Oh yeah, I understood your point, but given MDY Industries, LLC v .Blizzard who knows what the "right" judge would rule? With IP laws these days we're really getting into weird places.

Yeah I gotchu. I have no idea how that would go in a court for real. I was just trying to explain how and why things are the way they (sometimes) are

It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.

Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.

If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.

And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.

You don't want fully-specified rules because a rule with strict boundaries has loopholes. You actually want a clearly allowed area, a clearly disallowed area, and a gradually increasing gradient of punishment in between, so that a small change in behaviour produces only a small change in punishment, and avoiding punishment requires a large change in behaviour.

Exactly!

I think its more than the law doesn’t understand the technology.

It's definitely that programmers don't understand law.

i just screenshotted this comment without your consent

I think users implicitly consent to their public data being public data when they put it in public together with other public data.

How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.

Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.

No it’s not

Are they distilling?

Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.

That's not what distilling is either. Distilling is training your AI to exactly copy someone else's AI.

Distilling is reverse engineering. It is literally copying someone else.

Because LLM's output is not copyrightable?

How do you know data is copied to their servers?

> If you serve as a mere conduit for automatic transmission of user communications, there are no other qualifications or obligations you need to meet. If you serve a caching function, in addition to the two requirements above, you must maintain comply with the notice-and-takedown process.

https://www.copyright.gov/512/

https://internetcases.com/2024/02/12/dmca-subpoena-to-mere-c...

i have not deputized twitter to post takedowns on my behalf. its my content and copyright, not twitter's

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