Comment on “Piracy is Piracy” – Disney and Universal team up to sue Midjourney
AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.world 1 week ago“if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use.”
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 1 week 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.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Tbh, this is not a question about scraping at all.
Scraping is just a rather neutral tool that can be used for all sorts of purposes, legal and illegal.
Neither does the technique justify the purpose nor does outlawing the technique fix the actual problem.
Fair use only applies for a certain set of use cases and has a strict set of restrictions applied to it.
The permitted use cases are: “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research”.
And the two relevant restrictions are:
(Quoted from 17 U.S.C. § 107)
And here the differences between archive.org and AI become obvious. While archive.org can be abused as some kind of file sharing system or to circumvent paywalls or ads, its intended purpose is for research, and it’s firmly non-profit and doesn’t compete with copyright holders.
AI, on the other hand, is almost always commercial, and its main purpose is to replace human labour, specifically of the copyright owners. It might not be an actual problem for Disney’s bottom line, but it’s a massive problem for smaller artists, stock photographers, translators, and many other professions.
That way, it clearly doesn’t apply to the use cases for fair use while violating the restrictions.
And for that, it doesn’t matter if the training data is acquired using scraping (without permission) or some other way (without permission to use it for AI training).