How’s that for a throw back
https://open3dlab.com/project/e2a0830d-f166-4b1b-aabf-8ca735...
Just an example, there's plenty more on the frontpage.
I have nothing against these guys, but I just can't understand the moral high ground of the complaint.
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.
And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.
Or am I misreading the situation?
Well I don't! Copyright is a farce and I continue to wipe my butt with it.
Straight up theft, not fan recreations, theft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidugiRfHaY ("Ripping Encrypted Unreal Engine Models" | Open3DLab)
(Found via a sidebar ad on their webpage).
I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.
https://open3dlab.com/project/0a4538ba-00df-4f6d-b3e3-14d978...
Again, I don't have any particularly strong issue with this, just with the pearl clutching regarding roblox downloading the data.
Party B: massive IP business , very aggressive about everything from brand to software, defends and monetizes current copyright regime
I think it’s fair for party A to call out party B for downloading a massive trove of known-copyrighted material.
If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.
If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.
Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things
more radicalization towards AI
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough? Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
Either by technical means or by a whistleblower.
Which might be a gamble worth doing, but also might not. And regardless, the fact that it is a gamble alone slows down velocity.
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.
But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
it is open and better indeed. open and better for capital - the true, living, flesh-eating god.
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?
That’s probably a decent starting point, but a little older. I am not sure if the situation has changed any in 2026.
Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.
And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
Maybe I'm an idiot and it is a bad idea. But also maybe not?
Isn't it good if I "showcase my incompetence and lose all respect"? Wouldn't that be beneficial to people that disagree with these ideas?
Take a big breather and think: « how can I have a nice day? ». It’s not that serious!
I get the frustration, but perhaps changing the target somewhat might be in order here, no?
Why would you just try the insulting harder? Why not pivot to literally any other strategy lmao
I mean I guess this would work on a lot of people here, but three times in a row? Come on man. Skill issue
Blocking "scrapping [sic]" is also not security theater, you misunderstand the intent of GP.
A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
Look at the timelines - this scraper was running on someone's laptop: it turns off when they shut down for the weekend and lunch.
What is the actual news here, can anyone explain ????
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
I don't see a problem
> ignored our Terms of Service
ban them from the service then and case closed?
> and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only
because it's been proven they have been used commercially?
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
Which is it then? Megacorps can enforce their TOS through the law but small companies cannot?
Farming outrage by implying "Roblox is downloading adult content to show to kids!!!" with zero proof is pathetic.
We know NSFW data pollutes many otherwise non-adult datasets, so genAI is going to be trained on naughty stuff inadvertantly regardless - they might need a smut neuron specifically to turn off that sort of output.
Or they are just being irresponsible. point is, we dont know.
It's still a tad icky to scrape tons of data without asking, and downright rude to ignore robots.txt and ToS, but that's the world we live in.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
Companies copying things to make profit for themselves not being held accountable.
Progress is one thing, injustice is another.
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
Let me refer you to my earlier distinction between things that have happened and things you fear.
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
Which is different than using the data 1 to 1.
Or maybe the FSF is just waiting for everyone using AI code to become hooked and then subpoena every Antrophic/OAI/Codex customer and force the most massive source release in history (If Adobe/MS would file lawsuits vs the Craft apps and with their resources create legal precedent it could create chaos, maybe the only part stopping them right now from filing lawsuits is them realizing it could backfire since they're heavy AI users themselves).
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
Sure it can. If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
> If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.
Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.
People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.
I guess we'll never know until you learn to read anything other than sheet music.
You can't enforce a license on a 3d model you in turn stole from a game.
If yes, they were in violation of the license. Fyi, that's explicitly stated in the article we're commenting on.
good thing you explained how copyright works legally, almost spend my money unnecessarily.
I don't know what's more wrong: that a dumb model started downloading "Horse cock dildo" 3D models (to which end? to stuff that virtual 3D "horse cock dildo" in its own virtual LLM ass?) ...
Or that there exist "horse cock dildo" 3D models.
Seriously in which world are we living?
And I should be thinking about the people who designed that horse cock dildo and care about them? And those viewing those/using those? 3D printing those maybe? And I should care about the retards who can't even prevent their crawler from downloading 145 GB full of horse cock 3D dildo models and the like?
Nah. Fuck that, I care about my family and you're all on your own.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).