alt Hacker NewsI have a very vague concept for this, with a different implementation.
Some, uh, sites (forums?) have content that the AI crawlers would like to consume, and, from what I have heard, the crawlers can irresponsibly hammer the traffic of said sites into oblivion.
What if, for the sites which are paywalled, the signup, which invariably comes with a long click-through EULA, had a legal trap within it, forbidding ingestion by AI models on pain of, say, owning ten percent of the company should this be violated. Make sure there is some kind of token payment to get to the content.
Then seed the site with a few instances of hapax legomenon. Trace the crawler back and get the resulting model to vomit back the originating info, as proof.
This should result in either crawlers being more respectful or the end of the hated click-through EULA. We win either way.
Replies
In Canada and the United States, the penalties for breach of contract are determined based on the actual damages caused. Penalty clauses are generally not enforceable. The courts would ignore your clause and award a dollar amount based on whatever actual damages that you can prove.
That said, I am not a lawyer and this may not be true in all jurisdictions.
I seem to recall some online lawyer saying that much of what's actually described in EULAs isn't strictly enforceable, simply because it is mentioned.
For example, a EULA might have buried in it that by agreeing, you will become their slave for the next 10 years of your life (or something equally ridiculous). Were it to actually go to court for "violating the agreement", it would be obvious that no rational person would ever actually agree to such an agreement.
It basically boiled down to a claim that the entire process of EULAs are (mostly) pointless because it's understood that no one reads them, but companies insist upon them because a false sense of protection, and the ability to threaten violators of (whatever activity) is better than nothing. A kind of "paper threat".
As it's coming back to me, I think one of the real world examples they used was something like this:
If you go to a golf course and see a sign that says, "The golf course is not responsible for damage to your car from golf balls." The sign is essentially meant as false deterrent - It's there to keep people from complaining by, "informing them of the risk", and make it seem official, so employees will insist it's true if anyone complains, but if you were actually to take it to court, the golf course might still be found culpable because they theoretically could have done something to prevent damage to customers cars and they were aware of the damage that could be caused.
Basically, just because a sign (or the EULA) says it, doesn't make it so.
This doesn't work like you think it does but even if it did, do you have the money to sustain several years long legal battle against OpenAI?