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- cross-posted to:
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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.”
I mean it literally is. People post it there voluntarily knowing that. It’s what keeps the lights on.
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.
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
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.
It’s actually a fascinating bind Steve/Reddit has put themselves in. Because it is a non-exclusive license, you can affirmatively declare your content is free for anyone to scrape or use.
After that, if Reddit ever asserts rights over your content by, say, suing Microsoft for improperly using your content in training data, you now have a legal claim against Reddit for interference with either your ownership rights or with a contract via whatever license you have made your content available under.
Now, maybe Reddit has a claim release in their TOS, but it wouldn’t prevent you from getting an injunction enjoining Reddit from restricting your data from being used by Microsoft.
It’s kind of academic, because… it’s not really a victory that Microsoft is also training its AI on your data. But, hey, they’re probably doing it anyway and at least this way we get to screw over Huffman for being an ass.
The only issue I see with this is that it can be argued that this license doesn’t grant third parties access to data on Reddit’s platform.
MS couldn’t access that content without scraping the page itself, though, which of course belongs to Reddit. From a legal standpoint, it’s like a paywall.
It’s right there in the ToS: NON-EXCLUSIVE license. If they go to court, I would guess they lose.
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.
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.
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.
You see what happens, Larry?
You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?!
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.
Press x to doubt.
F
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.
“yearly”?
Yes, but that’s just the tip
I think I read somewhere that his base salary is somewhere around $550k, so that would make him all head and no shaft. Probably carries two raisins in his pocket.
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.
Gotta love corpo fellatio