The suit illustrates the challenges platforms are having around controlling what happens to their data.
Let’s say a website makes it a violation of its terms of service for you to send bots onto its pages in order to vacuum up its text, which you want to package as AI training data and sell. Next, suppose you think of a workaround: you don’t send your data scraping bots to that website, but to Google results pages that also have the text you’re looking for. Are you a business genius, or a thief?
If Reddit doesn’t succeed with its latest long shot legal effort against data scrapers, and you’re one of the companies doing this, you might just be a business genius, legally speaking anyway.
Reddit’s new suit, filed Wednesday in New York, is the latest round of legal Wac-a-Mole being played between established online platforms and the increasingly intricate data-sucking firms that want their precious data.
