I’d encourage people to actually read the article. I know that the title kind of inspires a kneejerk reaction, but legally, this is kind of interesting and I believe has broad implications.
So, basically, there’s a company, Bright Data, scraping X comments for stuff like training AI.
X went after them because X wanted to (and does) sell those comments.
But while I think that it’s fine for X to attempt to disrupt Bright Data’s scraping attempts using technical means, they can’t use the law to restrict them on copyright grounds.
That might have implications for all sorts of things. Reddit’s legal position, as Reddit likes selling access to Reddit comments. Training AI on discussion in general. The ability of organizations like archive.org to archive publicly-available comments. Maybe it’ll make social media companies have their content not-publicly-accessible, if creating a closed club gives X more control over selling that content.
Yeah if something is publicly available for one use there isn’t really a compelling reason to make it cost money for another use just because the company didn’t see the original value in it. It makes no sense.
I do feel like these tech companies are starting to hide their content though. That’s going to make the Internet way less useful in the long run I think. But who knows what will come next to change things again.
The gist, X can’t say: look that data isn’t mine so I can’t control the content (well to an extent). But also the data is mine and you can’t mine the data, well you can’t mine it without giving me a piece of the pie.
X tried the legal approach, and it didn’t make it far.
I’d encourage people to actually read the article. I know that the title kind of inspires a kneejerk reaction, but legally, this is kind of interesting and I believe has broad implications.
So, basically, there’s a company, Bright Data, scraping X comments for stuff like training AI.
X went after them because X wanted to (and does) sell those comments.
But while I think that it’s fine for X to attempt to disrupt Bright Data’s scraping attempts using technical means, they can’t use the law to restrict them on copyright grounds.
That might have implications for all sorts of things. Reddit’s legal position, as Reddit likes selling access to Reddit comments. Training AI on discussion in general. The ability of organizations like archive.org to archive publicly-available comments. Maybe it’ll make social media companies have their content not-publicly-accessible, if creating a closed club gives X more control over selling that content.
Yeah if something is publicly available for one use there isn’t really a compelling reason to make it cost money for another use just because the company didn’t see the original value in it. It makes no sense.
I do feel like these tech companies are starting to hide their content though. That’s going to make the Internet way less useful in the long run I think. But who knows what will come next to change things again.
The gist, X can’t say: look that data isn’t mine so I can’t control the content (well to an extent). But also the data is mine and you can’t mine the data, well you can’t mine it without giving me a piece of the pie.
X tried the legal approach, and it didn’t make it far.