Reddit says Microsoft’s Bing, Anthropic, and Perplexity have scraped its data without permission. “It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

  • lmaydev@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I mean it literally is. People post it there voluntarily knowing that. It’s what keeps the lights on.

    • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Sort of, but not really. From the Reddit ToS (emphasis mine). Basically, you own your content but allow Reddit to use it however they want without crediting you. Only a corporate lawyer would call that arrangement “ownership”, but I digress…


      By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.

      You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

      When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Beyond that, if you are serving webpages with data on them, you don’t get to decide what people do with those pages. They can’t stop search engines from scraping

        • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Just to nitpick, they can stop scraping, anyone can. However, doing so would require implementing barriers that tend to also negatively effect sites that are dependent on being discovered and browsed.

      • Bookmeat@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        It’s right there in the ToS: NON-EXCLUSIVE license. If they go to court, I would guess they lose.

      • chakan2@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Lol…really? So the can reuse, modify, and remove all association with your content, but somehow you think you still own it?

        I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

        • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          In essence, it means that you reserve the right to also use the content for your own purposes, without Reddit having any recourse to preventing you from doing that.

          • chakan2@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Except they published your work, all variants of said work, and completely eliminated you as the author of said work.

            I don’t know how else to explain to you that you don’t own that work anymore. You have rights to it. But you don’t own it.

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      It literally isn’t. Even their shitty EULA only claims a license to use it, not that it’s their data.

      And approximately 100% of the data on their servers was created while it was accessible to literally anyone who wanted it without restriction through a free API. Virtually none of the content was ever intended to be kept from fucking search engines so it could be sold for AI.

    • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      They are not responsible for what people post, nor do they pay anyone to post, therefore I do not see how they can claim the data as “theirs”.

      They have their own self-regualted rules, but ultimately most anything is fair game for reddit to point at the user and say “we take no responsibility for what an individual may post on this public form”.

      The only thing they will have a problem with is CSAM, but even then as long the volunteer mods remain effective at removing it, reddit will not be responsible for anything users post.

    • Grimy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yup keeps the lights on and makes sure Spez gets his yearly 200 million bonus. It’s good that they are tightening the screw because 200 million is clearly not enough, he deserves double that at least.