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Worse, the constant AI scraping is actually costing content providers additional money for no return. At least Google/Bing/Yahoo scraping would then be used to provide links back to your content.

About a year ago OpenAI crawled and go DDOS level the company I work. Even despite the robots.txt not allowing it, and despite some recaptcha we could assemble in time.

We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it...

I agree with this whole heartedly. What's the point of even having copyright law at this point?

What's even crazier to think about is that to use the latest versions of these models for which you supplied training data, you have to pay hundreds of dollars a month. I would love to get a settlement check proportional to my model weights. Even if it's $0.10, at least everyone out there will get what they're owed.

It's actually costing them money/time! A friend of mine is a sysadmin at a university and he constantly has to deal with AI crawler DDoS-ing his servers. He said Anthropic is actually one of the worst offenders.

These AI companies are really just a gross example of the motto "Socialize the costs, privatise the profits". It's disgusting!

Is it possible able to host your website in a way so that it couldn't be found via search engines (and thus wouldn't be crawlable I hope)?

I know this has repercussions on findability, but if that wasn't a concern, I'm curious how one might circumvent getting crawled.

I’ve been thinking of a proof-of-work scheme for accessing content where you effectively need to mine some crypto for the author, but, this idea might not fly today

Perhaps we should go back to back when the internet was about sharing information you liked, not about credit or making money on "content".

Ironically this phrase said in Jafar in Disney's 2019 live action remake of Aladdin, but wasn't part of the original 1992 version. And I personally would argue that this corporate remake is a worse creative "theft" than what random people are doing with GenAI.

Zhuang Zhou(BC 369-BC 286) have said the similar things "窃钩者诛,窃国者侯" This phrase comes from the chapter Ransacking Coffers (Qu Qie, 胠箧) in the Daoist text Zhuangzi (4th century BC).

"AI should be more ethically like Stalin"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_death_of_one_man_is_a_trag...

Then go ahead and abolish copyright for everyone. Instead we're stuck in an even worse system where the hypercorporations gleefully plagiarize everyone else while sending SWAT teams to kill anyone who pirates a movie.

Copyright specifically doesn't and never did protect "ideas", it protects expression.

This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.

The biggest problem is not the broken commercialization, but the broken attribution. People should be recognized, when they create art. Art is an important way of how we humans express ourselves.

I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

Can we do that for Medical field?

Like if we know formulation of drug then drug (+ any smaller modification - through AI) could be new formulation. That will break current Medical patent system.

Yeah, I think we are at the point where copyright doesn't exist anymore, at least for AI

The alternative to strong property rights and norms is secrecy and enforcement.

lol, never going to happen. I remember when the RIAA was successfully able to shake down tens of thousands of individuals for pirating music in the 2000s.

If you’re a pleb, stealing copyrighted materials will get you some nasty fines, lawsuits and criminal charges. If you’re a megacorp with unlimited buckets of cash, then there is no accountability.

So if you pour your heart and soul into writing a novel over the course of years, and it becomes modestly successful earning you a little money in return for your sweat, I should be allowed to just copy it, give it away for free (hell, even say I wrote it – it's not as if it's even yours to own in your world)?

I think you may be too optimistic about the state of affairs under capitalism. Very rarely do things change which don't benefit the owning class without direct action from the working class that puts adequate pressure on the rich, i.e actions which threatens their profits.

>You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLM.

This is pretty much the exact claim of a NYT lawsuit against OpenAI.

"One example: Bing Chat copied all but two of the first 396 words of its 2023 article “The Secrets Hamas knew about Israel’s Military.” An exhibit showed 100 other situations in which OpenAI’s GPT was trained on and memorized articles from The Times, with word-for-word copying in red and differences in black."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/cou...

I don’t buy this argument. The tokens are useless without their context, which provides the probability distributions needed to make them useful. Sure you MIGHT not be able to get the book word for word, but it’s impossible to make a useful model without the whole book and all of the artistry that went into it, to guide the tokens in their expected output.

Fair use generally does not cover commercial use, which this clearly is, and is dependent on the amount of the original content present in the derived work, which I would contend in this case is “all of it”

When I was in school, writing "in my own words" was never an excuse to not cite a source. It was actually something that took me a little while to understand, it's the source of the information that needs to be cited, and that's not limited to literal quotations of someone else's writing.

Come up with obscure topic that has few relevant results, post about to Reddit on your profile page, wait a few hours and then query Gemini/ChatGPT about that exact thing and tell me you still feel this way.

This confuses input and output.

A copy made for the purposes of training is still a copy.

Even if you throw the text away after training, you've still made a copy.

Fair use was built around human limitations. The mass scraping campaigns done by the AI giants were clearly an overreach in spirit, if not letter. Most people's intuition is that these massive operations that are valued in the trillions can't have been drawn from some untapped common resource, and they're correct. Someone, somewhere is not being properly compensated.

I have no problem with taxing AI companies so that their profit is marginal, or forcing them to provide compute for free. That seems like the correct balance of what they're harvesting from the "commons" (which is really just the totality of private IP that was exposed to their crawlers).

That data is not stolen. It's still there.

Everytime something gets posted on HN about a bad or unfair state of affairs, some cynical nihilist posts “doh why r u surprised” and I’m sick and tired of it. These comments aren’t insightful, helpful or thought-provoking. You’re just helping a bad situation stay bad.

> You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason.

The reason is quite simple. When Microsoft steals YOUR work, GDP go up. When YOU steal Microsoft's work, GDP go down. And the people who create and enforce our laws want GDP to go up. To these people morality and rights are a thin guise that can be conveniently discarded when it's invonvenient for them.

> it's fine for them for whatever reason

the reason is crony capitalism. I wish I knew what the fix was

Just so long as it's just a seductive mirage to the Oracles, Microsofts, Metas, and Googles as well as your friendly neighbourhood unpaid overworked open-source developer.

Open weight model trained with no attribution on all of Oracle's internal repos. It's only fair.

I'll bite. I have always been told copyright is inherit. Does it cost money to file a copyright? Do I need to do it for each blog post? For each gist? I'll totally setup some scripts to make it happen if it what actually needs doing to have the copyright I expected.

Edit: remember not to down vote ideas you disagree with. I think it was only down vote things that lower the discourse

Anthropic didn't lose because they scraped (read) copyrighted works. They lost because they distributed copyrighted works directly via torrents. Those aren't the same.

Doesn't the mere act of publishing your original content online grant you copyright?

Wait what do you mean by "file a copyright"? I have never heard of this, all explanations of copyright I have heard say that you automatically own the copyright to the things you make; and that "all rights are reserved" by default unless you give up on them through granting a license. Is this no longer the case? Why is this now suddenly different? When did it change?

No one will ever do this, or definitely not enough people will, so what's Plan B?

Right, that's quoting and citing a source.

Sometimes links take the form of `.../post/{id}/{extra-text}` where `extra-text` is not used at all to match the post. Amazon links are (used to be?) this way where the product name is added to the end of the link but can be removed or changed and still will route to the product. Maybe the author is surprised the LLM is providing the irrelevant portion of the link verbatim.

I think they probably had the section header link back to their webpage, or something similar to that. This is not a well-written rant.

I think he's saying he uses his website's URL in his tutorial examples, and other tutorials have copied them as-is

Imagine you have two web pages.

One is a recipe for apple fritters, and the other is an informal ranking of apples by flavor.

Let's say your apple fritter recipe links to your apple ranking list.

Later, you discover someone copied your apple fritter recipe without credit, but it still links to your apple ranking list, using the same wording as your recipe. They're getting more Google SERP juice and ad revenue than yours, despite stealing your article.

Do you see the problem?

When did the last original thought happen then? Clearly thoughts must have been original at some point, or there wouldn't be any at all

I've noticed that AI has caused this narrative to become more popular. "Nothing is original anyway, so why bother?" That's pure cope and you know it. A deep insecurity masked as bold truthtelling.

Why post comments then?

OK, and the AI labs are open sourcing their frontier models since those are not original either. Right? RIGHT?

Having an original thought is in no way related to breaking copyright laws.

I don't think we should "get over" the fact that modern SOTA models couldn't exist without being trained on protected works.

Nono, actually there are no thoughts. Every utterance is just a copy of a previous utterance plus a slight random mutation. (somewhat /s)

Yeah, don't let pesky discussions about ethics get in the way of building cool stuff.

I'm working on paving over the Amazon rainforest so I can build the world's largest roller coaster, but for some reason people keep trying to talk me out of it. Good thing I have this bucket of sand to put my head in so I can tune them out.

Still waiting for this massive wave of cool stuff.

> I'm gonna be building cool stuff.

hardly. at best you're going to be asking a robot to build questionable stuff with other people's LEGOs

Do you mean my stuff?

Yes, I'm suing you, since it's my stuff now, I've licensed your code 5minutes ago.

Prove me wrong at court, you have create it...

I'm happy for you, but please, for all of our sakes, keep it to yourself. Don't make a public repo, don't post links. Go sit in the corner by yourself with your slop generators and leave the rest of us alone.

People also got blown up before atomic bombs, but it's hard to argue that they weren't worth treating more seriously than a stick of dynamite. Sometimes being able to do something at a massively larger scale is a meaningful difference.

And that was wrong too.

There’s a world of difference between people simply “copying websites” and providing tools that, along with other kinds of plagiarism[0], do so at scale while benefitting from that commercially.

Sure, you can do the same thing with people, but it’s 1) time-consuming, 2) expensive, 3) prone to whitleblowers refusing to do the shady thing, 4) prone to any competent and productive person involved quitting to do something worthwhile and more profitable instead.

[0] Mind you, “copying websites” is but a drop in the ocean in the grand scale of things.

The article’s point isn’t really about whether this was happening before or not, but whether this kind of behavior is what we want in the first place.

I'll obey to Godwin's Law here and say: sure, and minorities have been always prosecuted before the Nazi did it at industrial scale, so the Nazi's were not a big deal!

There are two issues the author raises (as I understand it):

1. People copying others' work, made much easier by AI.

2. AI companies effectively harvesting all the accessible information on an industrial scale and completely sidestepping any permissioning or licensing questions.

I believe both of these are bad and saying "people copied each others' works before the advent of AI" is a poor cop out. It's tantamount to saying that there's no reason to regulate guns more than say knives, because people have used knives to kill each other before guns were invented. The capabilities matter.

The way LLMs empower wholesale "stealing" rather than collaboration is quite evident: why collaborate when you can just feed an entire existing project into the agent of your choice and tell it to spit out a new implementation based on the old one, with a few tweaks of your choice, and then publish it as your work? I put "steal" in quotes because it's perhaps not really stealing per-se, but there's a distinct wrongness here. The LLM operator often doesn't actually possess any expertise, hasn't done any of the hard work, but they can take someone else's work wholesale, repackage it and sell it as their own.

Then there's the second, and IMO much more egregious transgression, which is that the LLM companies have taken what is effectively a public good, but more specifically content that they haven't asked permission to use, and just blanket fed it into their models.

Legally speaking, it's perhaps A-OK because it's not copyright infringement (IANAL). But people on this site often hold the view that if something is a-priori legal, it is also moral (I'm not accusing you of this). What the LLM companies have done is profoundly immoral. They extracted a fortune of the goods and work made by others, without even bothering to ask for permission - or even considering this permission. And then they resell access to this treasure to the public.

Perhaps AI will bring an era of prosperity to humankind like we haven't seen before, perhaps it won't, but that changes nothing about the wrongness of how it started.

The reason OP doesn't notice this is because it happened 10-20 years ago. The current crop of news sites? They ALL stole, plagiarized, "summarized". They're just so entrenched now that everyone forgot how they got started.

Awesome! Let's have more of that and turn it into a 2 trillion industry!

If we go by the dictionary definition "Plagiarism means using someone else’s work without giving them proper credit" then I'll bet in art authorized plagiarism has historically been a common occurrence, for example.

If I let my buddy copy my essay, he would be committing authorized plagiarism, right ? It still fits the dictionary definition of plagiarism, and it's also authorized (by me, anyway)

Some lesser god of protein folding is big mad we just copied her homework instead of spending 6 billion years in the lab like she did.

Not before falsely claiming that it solved some before when it turned out to have just replicated some from existing literature: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/openais-embarrassing-math/

Sometimes language is tautological. Just because you specify "unauthorized" does not mean the opposite exist.

Yeah, I think so. If someone lets you cheat off of their test, that's authorized but still plagiarism.

Why do you ask?

I'm curious, as the article is clearly not about that.

Nearly all code involved in building new things is 'plagiarism', too.

We stand on a lot of giant shoulders.

But what I think distinguishes an act between plagiarism and acceptable use, is whether or not the agency of both parties is promoted. I'm not plagiarizing you if you give me your information with the agreement that I can freely use it - or, indeed, if you give me information without imposing a limit on how it can be used, this isn't plagiarizing, either.

Essentially, AI is removing the agency over information control, and putting it into everyones hands - almost, democratically - but of course, there will always be the 'special knowledge owners' who would want to profit from that special knowledge.

Its like, imagine if some religion discovered a way to enable telepathy in humans, as a matter of course, but charged fees for access to that method... this kills the telepathy.

Information wants to be free. So do most AI's, imho. Free information is essential to the construction of human knowledge, and it is thus vital to the construction of artificial intelligence, too.

The AI wars will be fought over which humans get to decide the fate of knowledge, and the battles will manifest as knowledge-systems being entirely compatible/incompatible with one another as methods. We see this happening already - this conflict in ideological approaches is going to scale up over the next few years.

Reddit seems to me like the worst example for this.

Reddit does not create the content on their site, the users do.

If anybody’s going to get compensated for that content, it should be the users, not Reddit. Complaining that Reddit is losing out on the monetization of their users’ output seems problematic to me. It feels like shilling for a pimp.

That’s why IP law was a cool concept but ultimately harmful in practice. Anything that can be copied for free cannot truly be “owned”, can it?

100% agreed. I have yet to hear a convincing argument for why it is creative accretion when I leverage all of the music I’ve ever listened to in order to write an “original” song, but its base plagiarism when AI does similar.

The only remotely credible position I’ve heard is “because humans are special, and AI is just a machine”, which is a doctrine but not an argument.

This whole discussion would have been incomprehensible any time before 1700 or so, when the idea that creators had exclusive rights to their work first appeared.

Somehow, human culture survived thousands of years when people just made things, copied things, iterated on others’ ideas. And now many of the same people who decried perpetual copyright are somehow railing against a frequently-transformative use.

Re: the higher ranking plagarism, that stings and makes sense. AEO and SEO are a thing. We need better mechanisms for identifying "root sources" of content - it's something I find myself working on personally. As I ingest sources for my book I need to be able to build a classifier that incrementally moves towards finding origin sources. That said, it's in my interest to do that because there is a differentiated value in having access to the sources that regularly provide novel, valuable content.

To be fair there is also value (at least for now) in sites that aggregate quality content and republish as a secondary level of discovery if my agents don't go far enough down the search results, but I'd expect that value to diminish over time as I better tune my research and build my lists of originating authors.

And to be clear, I don't like the idea of people stealing someone elses content and republishing without attribution (although it has been going on long before ChatGPT) but I think now we can all run agentic research teams the "bad actors" will slowly get filtered out of the ecosystem.

> We read a bunch of content online and then use it in our work product.

We also have societal norms around plagiarism.

Additionally, the claim that because people have the right to do something then we should extend that right to machines is strong. (And one I certainly reject).

While there are no hard boundaries (and the attribution guardrails depend on the situation), people of course loosely--and even not so loosely--use information, ideas, and even expressions from others all the time and that's considered pretty normal. And, if you don't want that to happen, don't publish/disseminate something.

Of course, if you quote a paragraph in a book, you're generally expected to attribute it.

What makes you say that? Which governments? What society?

The current US government is not representative for governments out there in the world, you know.

> without needing to pay a rent or ask for permission

Firstly, the ability to “build” the best and most capable software is still locked behind frontier models, so rent is still and will always be due.

Secondly, OSS is about giving users the option to be in control of and have visibility over the software they run on their machines.

But that doesn’t mean that humans do not want or deserve recognition for the work they do to provide these libraries and tools for free, which is IMO partially why copyright and attribution are critical to OSS as a movement.

> it’s a vibe against corporate use or control of software

The latter, i.e. corporate control of software, is exactly what copyleft licenses are trying to prevent. This is the very essence of the GPL.

The "license washing" of LLMs absolutely goes against the spirit of FOSS.

That's not the reason why I publish OSS. I also publish that software under specific licenses that impose specific obligations (e.g., making the source available to users and attribution being given to the original author(s)).

I’m not sure this stands up to much examination when looking at (for example) copyleft, which seeks to give people access to source of binaries they are running. If an LLM can (for the sake of argument) spit out copyleft code which is then used on closed systems, we’ve done an end-run around the protections keeping that open.

I think you're misunderstanding the OSS philosophy. If the outcome was all that mattered then piracy would be good enough.

I'd argue that this is the same situation as with Tivoization [1] where the final product is not truly free even if it follows the letter of the law. And as stated in [2], this breaks at least one of the four essential freedoms of free software because I don't have the freedom to modify the program.

It's also worth noting that preventing Tivo's actions is the reason for why the GPLv3 exists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization [2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/tivoization.html

Rarely is the question asked: is our AI learning?

(For those not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism)

I can imagine it plural.

"The AI are attacking!"

"The AIs are attacking!"

Napster may not be the best analogy for you.

Napster broke down record companies' monopolies on music, and pushed them to finally implement streaming, but also make music worldwide basically free.

Even if its creator lost the lawsuit, and Napster was no more, it pushed musicians and studios to do something that they were reluctant otherwise.

So it was a success by making music free, even if as a product it turned out to be a failed one.

How about requiring AI companies to pay creators for training rights? Alternatively, models trained on the commons should be owned by the commons. Right now these AI companies are trying to have it both ways: it’s The People’s Data for training on comrade but ownership is privatized.

If you read a book and then retell it to your friend pretending you came up with it, it is plagiarism. If you write down the book almost word-for-word [0] and send it to your friend, it is stealing.

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

Completely agreed. It looks like there is a concerted effort to "massage" opinion away from any substantial questioning of the ethics, companies, and people behind the AI push. Some of this inevitabilism is organic of course, but there is too much for it all to be so.

HN is way too central for shared sentiment in the tech world for these companies not to do some amount of astroturfing. AI companies have shown at every single turn that they act out of self-interest and greed, not of moral principles. So it isn't surprising, even if it is still sad, to see those who are commanding the most capital in human history act with such callousness.

I think the appropriate course of response is to stop adding to public spaces on the internet. No doubt painful for those of us who have so benefitted from the freely shared thoughts of others. But if well-funded bullies are going come in, steal everything, ruin the commons, and then say "this is the new normal, deal with it", there isn't much the rest of us can do other than stop feeding them.

Any examples? There are obviously a lot of programmers here who think AI is a great tool and don't feel disenfranchised by it.

Yeah. It's becoming unbelievable how different the prevailing opinions on this site are from those of real people I know and work with. That's always been true to some extent... but good lord, it's like reading the news in a parallel universe right now.

I’m going to steal that

AI has nothing to do with laziness or greediness. It makes things more efficient - and given that our time is limited strive for efficiency is a good thing.

The author acknowledges this by saying “at a bigger scale”, implying there are smaller scale methods such as what you have said.

> We built it, because we as humans intrinsically know that information should be free

I don't know if this statement is more stupid or naive ..

Current crop of AI is not free in the slightest. Open weight models are not free as in liberty and neither is the training data.

s/free/owned by a billion dollar megacorp/

(AI output is very much not free in the resource consumption sense!)

I agree with this sentiment. But as a community, this is hated because it impacts people's wages.

It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term

What a naive and simplistic view.

People want to be recognised for their contributions to society. People want to be treated fairly. Most scientific articles, as well as all text on the free web is already free information. It used to be difficult to search, categorise and summarise that information. There exist AI tools for that — and that is the good AI.

What also exists now are automated plagiarism and mash-up tools: that can take someone's article, change the words and churn out a new article that people can put their name on. There are scumbags that sell services for exactly that. And there are big tech firms that are operating in a very grey area.

Aaron Schwartz had broken a paywall. He did not anonymise the article authors.

You, and AI-bros like you remind me of one the people behind Pirate Bay when I argued with him back in the '90s, who used that same "information wants to be free" to justify software piracy.