alt Hacker NewsI do not understand what "theft" they are talking about. Those AI bots were scraping publicly accessible internet.
Publicly. Accessible.
Of course there are some parts of the publicly accessible internet which host content that may be considered illegal or has been obtained illegally. If those AI bots used such content as well, it is fair to call it out as wrong, in my opinion. But that is a separate topic.
Blindly calling scraping of publicly accessible internet a "theft" is, in my opinion, disingenuous. Especially when coming from a company operating a web search engine. Which itself has its own bots scraping the same parts of the internet 24/7.
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If I make the path behind my home publicly accessible so people in our town can get where they’re going easier, then Amazon builds a warehouse in our town and starts driving their trucks through my path 24/7, are you going to tell me “well you made it public access, they have a right to it same as everyone”?
With the advent of trillion dollar corporations selling extremely powerful general purpose imitation as a service, the meaning of “public access” has substantially changed, potentially invalidating the original agreement.
A lot of sites have terms and conditions which explicitly disallow the use of site content as a part of another service.
If I have a bike and you start renting it out without my permission, surely you are committing theft of some sort.
If I build a complex custom bike and you start copying individual features from it on your custom bikes, surely you are committing theft of some sort, but whether it’s punishable depends on whether I’ve decided to go full corporate and protect my designs with patents and trademarks. You’ll be hard pressed to patent or trademark anything if I have published and documented prior art.
Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean you can use it for free, or that it gives you rights to do whatever you want with it.
I can access a public park, but that doesn't necessarily give me the right to also bike on its sidewalks, or walk on the grass, or take some of the plants home with me.
> ... or has been obtained illegally
Similarly, content that is _accessible_ publicly may be illegal to _obtain_, these aren't mutually exclusive.
On the internet, you'll find there are terms of services and licenses. These restrict how you can use even publicly accessible material. Public availability doesn't give you a license to use it however you want.