I fucked with the title a bit. What i linked to was actually a mastodon post linking to an actual thing. but in my defense, i found it because cory doctorow boosted it, so, in a way, i am providing the original source here.
please argue. please do not remove.
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if anybody gets a copy of it, they have no ethical obligation not to share it, and every ethical justification for sharing it.
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this reads like an appeal to ridicule. if you have an objection to what I said please state it.
Every web request costs someone money. If you aren’t paying them you are being provided a service. They’ve given you knowledge/ material in their possession free of charge. You are taking advantage of that good will by using the content for purposes not intended. That is a moral failing.
To be clear the ownership of the material is not important, just the access is immoral, as the harm is already done.
Ill add the caveat that it can be moral if they’ve specifically told you you can via the websites robot.txt file which websites of consequence all have. But the assumption has to be they don’t intend this because that is how consent works.
this is a very common human activity
You asked if it’s moral, this is irrelevant
I did not
The original post in this chain talked about ethics, I was continuing that conversation.
In terms of free use, I feel the collection/aggregation of the data is a work in itself. You are taking a greater portion than the author specified you can take. Courts have ruled this does not constitute free use when people used yahoo’s market data. How is it any different now when people are using orders of magnitudes more data.
why? if someone publishes something on port 80, why should I ever assume they mean anything but for me to have and use that data?
Because there is a standard way for people to make their consent known. Just because you ignore someone withholding you consent doesn’t mean you are free morally.
I’d say it is immoral not to share useful information with other people.
only if there were so e sort of agreement about what the acceptable uses are and what is not acceptable.
That’s exactly what robot.txt is… they spell out that they don’t want you to access this site with an automated system.
right. so hiring 50 college kids to manually visit every page and cache it for study is fine.
That would probably be more expensive than just paying companies. But it is morally different because a human did visit their website so their good will was not violated as they expressed this consent when they published the website.
if you ARE paying them, you’re being provided a service, too
Yes I agree your use style could be immoral based on the agreement your transaction specifies. But if you’ve agreed your payment is to access their material then you have consent.
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an appeal to ridicule is also called a horse laugh fallacy. it’s like writing lol instead of actually explaining what’s wrong with the position to which your objecting. this response also reads like an appeal to ridicule. if you can’t explain what’s wrong with my position, maybe you shouldn’t be speaking about my position.
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this isn’t what I said. it’s a straw man.
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I’ve only stated my position. I haven’t actually provided any justification one way or the other. your suggestion that I have sounds like gas lighting.
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theft rape and murder are criminal matters. copyright is civil, and, yes, the courts can adjudicate every individual case.
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except that sometimes those are statutory. fair use claims cannot be statutory.
no such thing as a civil crime. you are thinking of a tort.
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please cite that for me, if you have 3 seconds.
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I have to admit, I did not realize that bare copyright infringement could be criminal, but it also requires criminal intent, so any defense lawyer would argue there was a fair use intent, and even if the civil matter were decided against the defendant, surely the criminal matter would be dropped.
The prosecuting lawyer would argue the intent was in fact criminal and not fair use.
You can’t just state “I had a fair use intent”, you state your intent (e.g. selling an AI model that creates content for financial gain) and the court determines if that intent was criminal or fair use. And considering criminal copyright law is intended to prevent others from financially profiting from your work, this can be construed as criminal intent. So I would not be so sure that the criminal matter would be dropped so easily.
Of course in this specific case, there’s a bit of a grey area, so the first case would not have criminal intent. But if ruled against the AI companies, subsequent cases could argue criminal intent as the AI companies should know by then that what they’re doing isn’t allowed.
surely you see the difference between a crime and a tort, now.
so where do these say my use is not fair use?
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Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Criminal copyright laws prohibit the unacknowledged use of another’s intellectual property for the purpose of financial gain. Violation of these laws can lead to fines and jail time. Criminal copyright laws have been a part of U. S. laws since 1897, which added a misdemeanor penalty for unlawful performances if “willful and for profit”.
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