You're laughing, but they're probably going to use these models to train a model and allow players design their characters from a prompt.

> Some examples include models of Eve from Stellar Blade, Mei from Overwatch, and a Horse cock dildo.

Lmao!

If you read the article, you'd find they admit to that, their position is nuanced, and this is not a "gotcha".

> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.

> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.

Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.

https://open3dlab.com/project/04d18c1b-c508-4017-be7b-766904...

Straight up theft, not fan recreations, theft.

Oddly, this makes their argument even stronger. Why would Roblox download this?

Funnily enough the YouTube video that came up when I viewed the page was an instructional video on ripping models from Unreal Engine games.

Considering you link something that has a non comnercial license CC-by-NC, there might be others with permissive licenses. There might be things in their TOS of the site,

DMCA safe harbor? They're not responsible for user uploads until they are made aware of violations.

well it kinda worked? over on reddit r/gaming thinks the data has been stolen

more radicalization towards AI

Moral high grounds don't mean much these days. They are weaponized as a way to get an advantage in an argument.

There have been a number of articles on the frontpage of HN about the residential proxy traffic. It is happening. This was one of the most popular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791

I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)

Allmost all the bottraffic I see is from random residential proxies though.

I currently tarpit traffic from AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. since it's not like any of my real customers have their PC inside those networks. (I then use that for experiments with providing bogus data to AI scrapers.)

Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.

Won't this harm SEO? What about agentic software suites where authorized users should be able to drop an app passkey into grokbot or such?

true! but how does one find all those ips?

>But I don't see that happening.

Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).

If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.

would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???

They should change their name to openish3dlab.

Not really. Given that roblox is almost entirely children, and given the amount of hot water they're in you'd think they'd stay the hell away from adult content

It's entirely plausible to me that they could be training an NSFW 3D model detector, specifically because of their very minor userbase. TFA seems to presume it's all being used to train genAI, in exactly the same fashion.

We know NSFW data pollutes many otherwise non-adult datasets, so genAI is going to be trained on naughty stuff inadvertantly regardless - they might need a smut neuron specifically to turn off that sort of output.

Or they are just being irresponsible. point is, we dont know.

It's still a tad icky to scrape tons of data without asking, and downright rude to ignore robots.txt and ToS, but that's the world we live in.

Because of the implication

They didn't do it in the intended manner.

> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.

The news is that people download it so much that they saturate your server’s connection and/or peg its CPU or disk (whichever is the weakest link in the chain). We used to call this a Denial of Service attack but now it’s apparently just a cost of doing business, even for people who just want to run a non-commercial hobby site.

https://therecord.media/linkedin-wins-court-order-blocking-m...

Which is it then? Megacorps can enforce their TOS through the law but small companies cannot?

Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.

"Leopard ate MY face" ?

I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.

But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.

(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)

"supercrawlers like this"

then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."

sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol

Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.

This is quite simple put in the article.

> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.

It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).

AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.

This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.

Never, it gets new players constantly. This is like saying I wonder when YouTube is going to turn into Pornhub

You know there are new kids being made right..

Robloxs original player base is their 20s now and still play.

They ignored the licenses, so kinda moot point you're making.

145gb of ram? Check out Mr. Moneybags over here!

Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?

Would you also say that general licensing is irrelevant for everyone?

People really still buy into that framing? I think it's pretty clear that it's generally just about money as it has always been.

Who's "we"?

If the authors of the data are paid...ok. and not just the biggest players - every single one. But they are not.

"we" in this sentence is really a handful of encloistered silicon valley weirdos. Most people do not like it and have no real say in the matter.