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Comment by mopsi | Hacker News Reader

Dead wrong on both points. Having a license to publish something on a website does not mean that the publisher has the right to grant sublicenses or transfer the license to someone else. For example, stock image licenses are normally non-sublicensable and non-transferable.

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But Meta is not asking for anything of the sort, like you must assign to us the rights to use stock images. Just consent to the scraping activity.

The publisher using stock images does have the right to transmit those images to visitors. Those visitors don't have the right to incorporate the images into their own public work that they rebroadcast. But Meta isn't asking for that; they want consent from the business to scrape. The subsequent copyright violation is then a matter between Meta and the vendor of the stock images.

You’re missing half the picture here. It’s not the scraping that’s the big problem, it’s what the rest of the TOS say they can do with everything they get from scraping your site. Like use it to train their AI and provide responses to people questions. That’s part is the real legally contentious part, for a multitude of reasons. I imagine they see this as a way of getting around things like Australia’s requirement they pay a fee to news outlets if they show their content. The TOS also says they can create fake accounts on your site, for scraping. Which means if you have anything on your site, that you don’t have full legal rights to distribute and use in any fashion you like, you are at significant legal risk if you continue to use anything meta after 30 October.

I'm not missing anything. I just don't believe that by granting those permissions you're making the legal representation that you are licensing third party material. The request is not worded in those terms, even, just as a consent to engage in scraping and subsequent uses of the material. For those materials that you do own, the consent does amount to licensing. For materials you don't own, the consent only covers the activity of scraping; you consenting to the material being used for training simply means nothing. You have attested that you have no objection to that. That doesn't remove the copyright holder's right to have an objection. All those things they are asking for, any visitor can engage in without any permission, and everyone knows it.

Imagine someone asks you: see that guy across the street? Do I have your consent to search his pockets? If you say yes, what does it mean? Precisely nothing.

Suppose you are asked: do I have your consent to search the pockets of everyone in this neighborhood? If you say yes, it still means nothing with regard to the guy across the street, who has not given any constent, but you've consented to your pockets being searched.

>Imagine someone asks you: see that guy across the street? Do I have your consent to search his pockets? If you say yes, what does it mean? Precisely nothing.

I think if you have some kind of authority over the place where this happens and/or if you facilitate an illegal action then you could be breaking the law.

Well, you are not in an analogous position of authority with regard to some licensed stock images or whatever. You are not the guardian of their copyright, charged with defending them from illegal copying. You were licensed those images knowing that the world-wide public will fetch copies of these images and do whatever they want.

If you signed some agreement whereby you pledge to protect licensed images from AI scraping bots, then signing off on a consent to Meta would breach that agreement.

There is no such agreement. Licensees of images are understood to be broadcasting them to the entire world, including anonymous visitors.

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