Potentially, but I’m glad somebody is taking a minute to question whether or not a handful of tech companies have the right to consume everyone’s information, build their entire business with it and then sell that back to the people whose data they wouldn’t have existed without in the first place.
If you limit scraping and fair use, it further entrenches the power of the tech and content giants.
If you're upset about big tech's power and influence, you should be cheering on the free use of publicly available information, as it has the best shot at unseating that power.
What has been closed? Every day there's new foundational models being released. It's exhausting trying to keep up with the pace of change - Alpaca, Vicuna, LLaMA, etc. I'd be shocked if there wasn't a truly open source foundational model with performance equivalent to OpenAI's GPT-4 by the end of the year.
Any move to limit fair-use and scraping of publicly available information through copyright laws, no matter how good of a reason it is, gives more power to the biggest companies.
Explain?
If you block fair-use and scraping, those that hold the most data and copyrights (the largest companies) will be the only ones able to create quality foundational models, thus holding the keys and further entrenching their power.
Too many people seem to think that just because something’s public it means they’re allowed to do whatever they want with it. That’s incorrect. The only barrier is whether someone you copy from is willing to bring legal action.
The relevant quote, originally written in 1990 and cited in 94, is thus:
" [If] the secondary use adds value to the original--if the quoted matter is used as raw material, transformed in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings--this is the very type of activity that the fair use doctrine intends to protect for the enrichment of society. "
We've wandered into uncharted legal territory with only a few light posts guiding the way. Nothing about this is settled or obvious.
https://www.thefashionlaw.com/ai-trained-on-copyrighted-work...
Doesn't need to be private in order to be copyrighted.
That being said, this is not what the current ban is about. The ban was ordered by GDPR regulators who have suddenly decided that using publicly available information on the web to train machine learning models is not allowed due to "privacy concerns". It has nothing to do with copyright.
We can’t just live in a world where something is by default up for grabs by big companies just because it’s out there.
Scraping seems to create a few dozen winners and 99% losers from the data we have.
They built their businesses on scraping, then when they had their lock-in and monopolies, they turned around and fought against scraping to keep up-starts from eroding their business.
This blog is a great overview of the current landscape around scraping laws.
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/12/hello-youve-be...
Samsung got bit by it https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1643903974536347649
That’s quite literally what google has done for 25 years, just with advertising for monetization.
I think we're finally coming around on that (I think a lot of regulators were slow on antitrust in the internet space because the harm to the consumer/environment is not immediately obvious - i.e. it's mostly non-monetary externalities)
Same as America as a whole and offshoring to reduce labor cost. The externalities are slow but they're clearly there in the increasing polarization and the growth of the precariat.
> handful of tech companies
What about the Open Source models? What prevents the rest of the companies to innovate here?
They also tried to do the same with the book industry, fortunately publishers had money to pay for lawsuits against Google.
https://barac.at/essays/request-for-funding-a-business-exper...