Reddit says Microsoft’s Bing, Anthropic, and Perplexity have scraped its data without permission. “It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

Reddit says Microsoft’s Bing, Anthropic, and Perplexity have scraped its data without permission. “It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    That gets really murky though. For example:

    • news sites w/ comment sections - they’re profiting from ads and subscriptions, so how much of that has to do with the comments?
    • ecommerce - reviews on Amazon and eBay could be considered advertising for the product. Who’s liable, the ecommerce site, the merchant, or the poster?
    • product websites - how much are posted “reviews” considered advertising for the product? There may not be direct sales on the website, but surely someone’s review would impact sales elsewhere
    • for-profit services with a discussion forum - these would be on a separate site from the revenue-generating service, but still associated with the brand and thus likely contributing to advertisements for the product

    It’s a lot more obvious for social media sites like Facebook since user-generated content is the service, but there are a lot of for-profit entities where user-generated content is highly relevant, but not the core service. Would those sites be essentially forced to either moderate or eliminate user interaction?

    There’s a lot of complexity here.