Reddit CEO: Microsoft needs to pay to search the site
theverge.com
theverge.com
All this writing, mine and thousands of others', is what makes reddit's content valuable. Pay the value creators.
> He specifically named Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying it has been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”
Surely updating robots.txt isn't the pain in the ass he is referring to?
An index is a derivative-enough work that copyright doesn't apply.
The idea of ignoring robots.txt when it is abused for greed sounds okay, but it would be much better if the industry was in a spot where we respected each others' requests, and peers don't make requests that put legitimate, honest actors at a disadvantage compared to rouge crawlers
There are 195 other countries you could scrape from though.
As for whether an index constitutes copyright infringement, that depends on its construction, but in the US generally not.
The terms of service bind the legal entity that is accessing Reddit’s servers, whereas reproduction of the data is governed by copyright law. Microsoft would still have to abide by US copyright law but there’s some wiggle room in terms of who is doing the scraping.