this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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You picked the wrong thread for a nuanced question on a controversial topic.
But it seems the UK indeed has laws for this already if the article is to believed, as they don't currently allow AI companies to train on copyrighted material (As per the article). As far as I know, in some other jurisdictions, a normal person would absolutely be allowed to pull a bunch of publicly available information, learn from it, and decide to make something new based on objective information that can be found within. And generally, that's the rationale AI companies used as well, seeing as there have been landmark cases ruled in the past to not be copyright infringement with wide acceptance for computers analyzing copyrighted information, such as against Google, for indexing copyrighted material in their search results. But perhaps an adjacent ruling was never accepted in the UK (which does seem strange, as Google does operate there). But laws are messy, and perhaps there is an exception somewhere, and I'm certainly not an expert on UK law.
But people sadly don't really come into this thread to discuss the actual details, they just see a headline that invokes a feeling of "AI Bad", and so you coming in here with a reasonable question makes you a target. I wholly expect to be downvoted as well.
Oh are we giving AI the same rights as humans now? On what grounds?
I never claimed that in this case. As I said in my response: There have been won lawsuits that machines are allowed to index and analyze copyrighted material without infringing on such rights, so long as they only extract objective information, such as what AI typically extracts. I'm not a lawyer, and your jurisdiction may differ, but this page has a good overview: https://blog.apify.com/is-web-scraping-legal/
EDIT: For the US description on that page, it mentions the US case that I referred to: Author's Guild v Google
You might not remember but decades ago Microsoft was almost split in two. But then it came to pass that George Bush "won" the elections. And the case was dismissed.
In the US justice system, money talks.
Oh I agree money talks in the US justice system, but as the page shows, these laws also exist elsewhere, such as in the EU. And even if I or you don't agree with them, they are still the case law that determines the legality of these things. For me that aligns with my ethical stance as well, but probably not yours.