It seems to me that a more effective strategy would be for an entity like Reddit or Stackoverflow to initiate a lawsuit, as they may be able to better prove that their owned/user’s content was copied, terms of service were violated, etc.
Next up, all content will be only viewable if you are signed in ala twitters change this morning.
The API changes and the ensuing chaos are at least in part because of OpenAI scraping Reddit’s content.
Purely conjecture obviously, but him being on both sides of that, not hard to see how all this becomes more favorable to his company making the moat wider for others.
It seems rather obvious under his perspective to do everything possible to restrict access to all information that could be used to train an LLM.
I understand Sam’s history with ycombinator gives him leniency around here but we seriously need to wake up to the fact that he’s attempting to monopolize the most powerful tool ever created. He talks a good game but if you pay attention to his actions it’s clear he is openly hostile towards the common good which he supposedly promotes.
I see him in the same regard as I see any oligarch vying for public favor by ‘stealing’ billions, donating a few million, and riding off into the sunset being praised by media for how much of the ill gotten gains he’s given back.
Instead they imposed an extremely abrupt new demand for money with any API call.
In case anyone wants to read more about it - it’s very relevant today.
More importantly, the laws are representations of human feeling and social negotiation. Copyright law grew out of a complex array of beliefs and interests. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
It could be that the various "AI" generative models are legal under current law. But it could also be that this is one of those things, like the printing press, that causes people to say, "Hey, that's not right," and change the law to rule out something that was previously legal.
"This is all 'wild west' to me as a European, but somehow I wonder if there is any guns that work to protect yourself by means of self-justice."
I vaguely remember a Stern magazine cover from around 2004, depicting a giant cowboy boot with "GM" decorated with red, white and blue coming down on a crowd of people standing in the shape of the Opel logo and titled something like "Der Wild-West-Method."
It was clearly not a compliment.
(Correction: GM had owned Opel for decades at that point, but was getting more aggressive with how it was run)
And courts never overrule prior decisions...
If that’s all it takes to skirt copyright restrictions Aaron Schwartz should be rolling in his grave right about now.