You did not read your source. Some quotes you apparently missed:
Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.
Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.
Please read your source before posting it and claiming it says something it doesn’t actually say.
Now why does Doctrow distinguish between good scraping and bad scraping, and even between good LLM training and bad LLM training in his post?
Because the good applications are actually covered by fair use while the bad parts aren’t.
Because fair use isn’t actually about what is done (scraping, LLM training, …) but about who does it (researchers, non-profit vs. companies, for-profit) and for what purpose (research, critique, teaching, news reporting vs. making a profit by putting original copyright owners out of work).
That’s the whole point of fair use. It’s even in the name. It’s about the use, and the use needs to be fair. It’s not called “Allowed techniques, don’t care if it’s fair”.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Are you saying that the mere action of scraping is fair use, or that absolutely anything you do with the data you scrape is also fair use?
LWD@lemm.ee 3 days ago
The Doctorow article does not say “scraping is good actually” - it says “scraping in X circumstance is good” and “scraping in Y circumstance is bad”, and wraps up by admitting the obvious and glaring contradiction.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 days ago
I’d say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It’s about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use. (Accuse me of “No True Scotsman” if you would like.)
But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there’s the potential that you’re doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn’t fair use.
Take archive.org for example:
It doesn’t only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.
I don’t personally think that’s a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there’s a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was “scraped” in the first place.
But in the case of gen AI, I think it’s pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it’s firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.
AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I think you make some compelling points overall, but fair use has always been more complex than this. The intent is taken into account when evaluating whether something is fair use, but so is the actual impact — “fair use” is a designation applied to the overall situation, not to any singular factors (so a stated purpose can’t be fair use)
kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 days ago
Yes, that’s a good addition.
Overall, my point was not that scraping is a universal moral good, but that legislating tighter boundaries for scraping in an effort to curb AI abuses is a bad approach.
We have better tools to combat this, and placing new limits on scraping will do collateral damage that we should not accept.
And at the very least, the portfolio value of Disney’s IP holdings should not be the motivating force behind AI regulation.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I think the distinction between data acquisition and data application is important. Consider the parallel of photography; you are legally and ethically entitled to take a photo of anything that you can see from public (ie, you can “scrape” it). But that doesn’t mean that you can do anything you want with those photos. Distinguishing them makes the scraping part a lot less muddy.