I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.

In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.

Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea. As it stands now an employee could invent the cure to cancer, the employer claiming it and then putting it in a vault to never use and bar anyone from creating it.

Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don't think that justifies the damage it does.

I didn't mean to suggest that. I consider calling copyright infringement "piracy" to be propaganda started by the music industry to push their monetary interests. A derogatory term that conflates it with immoral stealing (and murder). This overstates any harms caused.

While in capitalism we'll always have ip, copyright, what have you.

Gotta "protect" capital

Exactly

Profiting off the copied content makes it theft

I'd say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It's about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it "scraping" then it's always fair use. (Accuse me of "No True Scotsman" if you would like.)

But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there's the potential that you're doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn't fair use.

Take archive.org for example:

It doesn't only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

I don't personally think that's a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there's a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was "scraped" in the first place.

But in the case of gen AI, I think it's pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it's firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

Edit: And to be clear, when I say it's fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don't mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.

"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)

I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.

Perhaps now - yes. 20 years ago one could argue, but today in practice it, as it was intended, simply already doesn't exist. Those holding the IP are those having enough power to insert themselves in a right place. The initial purpose is just not achievable.

In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.

Yes, if the artist thinks that. And no, if the artist expects to make some money from every copy.

Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea.

That's true for patents and technologies, but not true for art and software, where it's improbable to just come up with the same thing.

Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don’t think that justifies the damage it does.

Now - maybe. There are a few traditional ways, like authors reading aloud pieces of their creations and people buying tickets to such performances, same with music. And models with paying forward for a request, like crowdfunding or an order.

But personally I still think some form of it should exist. Maybe non-transferable to companies and other people other than via inheritance. Intellectual work is work, and people do it to get paid. It's just not good enough if the returns don't scale with popularity.

That's part of the strategy. First, go after the small project that can't defend itself. Use that to set a precedent that is harder for the bigger targets to overturn.

I would expect the bigger players to get themselves involved in the defense for exactly that reason.

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.

Disagree, I think being in the pilot seat is important. The immersion of control amplifies the experience.

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The enemies of my enemies are my friends.

There is no logic in mans lust for power. The most self serving will do whatever it takes to achieve wealth, status, and control. The world made so much more sense once I realized that.

I think the distinction between data acquisition and data application is important. Consider the parallel of photography; you are legally and ethically entitled to take a photo of anything that you can see from public (ie, you can "scrape" it). But that doesn't mean that you can do anything you want with those photos. Distinguishing them makes the scraping part a lot less muddy.

But if both sides are your enemies, they're both your friends. But if they're your friends, they aren't the enemies of your enemies anymore, which would make them your enemies once again. But then they are your friends again. But then

But if both sides are your enemies, they're both your friends.

Yes. And both of my friends will weaken both of my enemies.

Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people's stuff whenever they want.

Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.

Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.

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:

• "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;"
• "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

(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).

You did not read your source. Some quotes you apparently missed:

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

Please read your source before posting it and claiming it says something it doesn't actually say.

Now why does Doctrow distinguish between good scraping and bad scraping, and even between good LLM training and bad LLM training in his post?

Because the good applications are actually covered by fair use while the bad parts aren't.

Because fair use isn't actually about what is done (scraping, LLM training, ...) but about who does it (researchers, non-profit vs. companies, for-profit) and for what purpose (research, critique, teaching, news reporting vs. making a profit by putting original copyright owners out of work).

That's the whole point of fair use. It's even in the name. It's about the use, and the use needs to be fair. It's not called "Allowed techniques, don't care if it's fair".

Stupid lawsuit because anyone can do Ai now.