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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

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Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#231

Post by htrp »

rich_sasha wrote: post #161
zqwt3k wrote: post #109

Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.

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.

except a bunch of paywalled stuff did end up in training corpora

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#232

Post by rimunroe »

immibis2 wrote: post #227
27183 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#233

Post by bayindirh »

nixpulvis wrote: post #228
brainwad wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...

Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:

Who has the gold makes the rules.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#234

Post by bluefirebrand »

nixpulvis wrote: post #228
brainwad wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...

No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days

If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#235

Post by znpy »

zqwt3k wrote: post #109

Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.

scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.

if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.

sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#236

Post by somehnguy »

rob wrote: post #184

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…

I don't visit his website. That's the whole point.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#237

Post by bluefirebrand »

embedding-shape wrote: post #167
rich_sasha wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Transformation . Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no. Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company

So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?

Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#238

Post by 27183 »

rimunroe wrote: post #226
27183 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

> 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.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#239

Post by brainwad »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #234
nixpulvis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...

No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#240

Post by rimunroe »

27183 wrote: post #238
rimunroe wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

> 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…

> 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.

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