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.

Many times these keys are obtained illegitimately and they end up being refunded. In other cases the key is bought from another region so the devs do get some money, but far less than they would from a regular purchase.

I'm not sure exactly how the illegitimate keys are obtained, though. Maybe in trying to not pay the publisher you end up rewarding someone who steals peoples' credit cards or something.

Midjourney isn't opensource, I can't run it on my PC, contrary to stable diffusion.

Yes, your fan art infringed on Blizzards copyright. Blizzard lets it slide, because there's nothing to gain from it apart from a massive PR desaster.

Now if you sold your Arthas images on a large enough scale then Blizzard will clearly come after you. Copyright is not only about the damages occured by people not buying Blizzards stuff, but also the license fees they didn't get from you.

That's the real big difference: if Midjourney was a little hobby project of some guy in his basement that never saw the the light of day, there wouldn't be a problem. But Midjourney is a for-profit tool with the express purpose of allowing people to make images without paying an artist and the way it does that is by using copyrighted works to do so.

Oh that's unfortunate. Well I don't mind not supporting people like that so I'll give it a go

Bite each others dicks off

that's a shit take.

anyone can do AI now, but everyone can't profit from it like they can. that's why the lawsuit.