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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

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Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#261

Post by dismalaf »

burnte wrote: post #260
dismalaf wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it's legal when you do it for your own use (same as browsing a website) but it's illegal to redistribute web scraped results.

It's not that cut and dry or else search engines wouldn't be legal. It depends on how much is used, for what context, etc. This very well may wind up being fair use.

Search engines "modify" it ie. show snippets + direct to the actual site.

In general fair use pretty much always requires it to be transformative and/or point to the source. Simply scraping it to prevent people from going to X isn't free use in any definition I've heard.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#262

Post by dismalaf »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #237
embedding-shape wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that you can't steal someone else's content 1:1. But you can use it for a different use (say, display the tweet in an article, then comment on it).

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#266

Post by amiga386 »

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…

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

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#267

Post by Klonoar »

immibis2 wrote: post #189
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.

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…

Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not.

Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#268

Post by [deleted] »

swed420 wrote: post #120
rob74 wrote: post #99

Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?

> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is. Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet anot…

[deleted]

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#269

Post by ktm5j »

Klonoar wrote: post #267
immibis2 wrote: post #189

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…

Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not. Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

Yes, that's what they went on to point out.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#270

Post by gosub100 »

dismalaf wrote: post #261
burnte wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that cut and dry or else search engines wouldn't be legal. It depends on how much is used, for what context, etc. This very well may wind up being fair use.

Search engines "modify" it ie. show snippets + direct to the actual site. In general fair use pretty much always requires it to be transformative and/or point to the source. Simply scraping it to prevent people from going to X isn't free use in any definition I've heard.

Remember ~10 years ago when Google had "cached" versions of the websites? I believe they removed that feature for this reason.
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