I do not understand what "theft" they are talking about. Those AI bots were scraping publicly accessible internet.

Publicly. Accessible.

Of course there are some parts of the publicly accessible internet which host content that may be considered illegal or has been obtained illegally. If those AI bots used such content as well, it is fair to call it out as wrong, in my opinion. But that is a separate topic.

Blindly calling scraping of publicly accessible internet a "theft" is, in my opinion, disingenuous. Especially when coming from a company operating a web search engine. Which itself has its own bots scraping the same parts of the internet 24/7.

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foresterre 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean you can use it for free, or that it gives you rights to do whatever you want with it.

I can access a public park, but that doesn't necessarily give me the right to also bike on its sidewalks, or walk on the grass, or take some of the plants home with me.

> ... or has been obtained illegally

Similarly, content that is _accessible_ publicly may be illegal to _obtain_, these aren't mutually exclusive.

On the internet, you'll find there are terms of services and licenses. These restrict how you can use even publicly accessible material. Public availability doesn't give you a license to use it however you want.

	▲	pbasista 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Public availability doesn't give you a license to use it however you want. Of course. You listed complex examples from the real world. A park where walking is allowed but damaging the plants is not, for instance. There it makes sense to distinguish various activities that can be done in there and treat them separately. But a website offers not much activities that you can do with it. You can read it. And that is about it.

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fwlr 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I make the path behind my home publicly accessible so people in our town can get where they’re going easier, then Amazon builds a warehouse in our town and starts driving their trucks through my path 24/7, are you going to tell me “well you made it public access, they have a right to it same as everyone”?

With the advent of trillion dollar corporations selling extremely powerful general purpose imitation as a service, the meaning of “public access” has substantially changed, potentially invalidating the original agreement.

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pbasista 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> are you going to tell me “well you made it public access, they have a right to it same as everyone”?

Yes. You can of course always close it to the public if the public usage bothers you. Or require those using it to agree to your terms and conditions where you restrict the speed, the weight, the time of the day, etc. Anything you want.

But if you choose to make it public with no restrictions, you have to be prepared to face the consequences.

	▲	fwlr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I posted a sign saying that but they’re still doing it, so I guess I’ll just close it to public access. Sucks for all of the people who now have to take a longer route. I hope they blame Amazon and not me.

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cluckindan 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of sites have terms and conditions which explicitly disallow the use of site content as a part of another service.

If I have a bike and you start renting it out without my permission, surely you are committing theft of some sort.

If I build a complex custom bike and you start copying individual features from it on your custom bikes, surely you are committing theft of some sort, but whether it’s punishable depends on whether I’ve decided to go full corporate and protect my designs with patents and trademarks. You’ll be hard pressed to patent or trademark anything if I have published and documented prior art.

	▲	pbasista 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> A lot of sites have terms and conditions which explicitly disallow the use of site content as a part of another service. Having terms and conditions in itself is irrelevant. Because in order for them to have any legal meaning, it is necessary for the other party to agree to them. An agreement can be implicitly enforced by law. Or explicitly enforced by the website itself before giving access to the data. If neither of those are present, there is no enforced agreement. And agreeing to it becomes optional. Such sites should be considered, in my opinion, publicly accessible. > If I have a bike and you start renting it out without my permission, surely you are committing theft of some sort. Of course. But that is a bad analogy. No one is "renting" or "taking" anything from those websites. The bots are just reading it. Therefore, a better analogy would be that you have a bike, parked out in the public, and people are looking at it. By looking at it they steal nothing from you. And the bike and all of its parts remain yours at all times. That is a suitable analogy, in my opinion, to what those bots are doing.
	▲	Ylpertnodi 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> If I have a bike and you start renting it out without my permission, surely you are committing theft of some sort. Where is the loss? Apart from trust?