221–230 of 765 posts
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Precedent is pretty clear: What cases are you citing when you say this?
Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.
There is no reason for xcancel to exist. Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content. Or you just visit X.com. Right? Right?
Of course not. Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.
Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers. I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an acc…
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website. You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".) If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives…
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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 downlo…
I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 downlo…
I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.
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.
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I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”. Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers. I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an acc…
At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty. Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks. As an example o…
It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access. It feels like an end of an era.
Reddit is still viewable, though they did finally axe "old" reddit for those not logged in. But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.