In this case, Party B is sandwiched between Party A (scraper such as Meta) and Party C (the third-party content provider). The scraping agreement dictates A-B relationship and the licensing agreement dictates B-C relationship. Devil is in the fine print as far as what is allowed in both agreements.
Party B has already committed to uphold B-C. Entering A-B may put them at risk of violating that agreement by appearing to grant Party A rights that Party C never granted to anyone but Party B (and maybe even rights that Party B doesn't enjoy). Party B's options are don't consent to A-B (e.g., withdraw from Meta program), take down the Party C content (which would suck if they've already paid for it), or negotiate a carve-out with one or both of Parties A and C.
I am not an expert in licensing legalese, but that strikes me as awfully wrong. If I am e.g. a musician and I license my work to be used by B for specific purposes and B unilaterally signs an agreement with A that gives them rights to my stuff, the question is gonna be what MY licensing terms allow. They have an agreement with me. Whether they enter other agreements is their decision to make, but they still have to fulfill my terms.
Sure, they should not sign things that put them into the spot of having to break my licensing agreement with me, but the fact that these kind of legal stretches are even seen as valid in the US reassures me in my stance to avoid business relations with the US. I prefer countries with a legal system that can't easily be bent out of shape using money.
You really hit the nail on the head. I can't sign over rights to stuff I don't own. Is there a good chance that this move could blow up in Meta's face, in which the Party B's organize (or are ordered) en masse not sign the license agreement and leave Zuck without the legal ability to steal while also losing marketshare?
I think more and more people like you around the world are realizing not only how corrupt the U.S. is, but that it's power and influence are in a sharp state of decline and perhaps not worth the risk at this point.
IANAL, but copyright binds everyone regardless of entering into any agreement. In that case Meta would still be potentially liable for its infringement, exactly because "thin-air right" is not a thing. B could not grant it, because they don't have it.
A license is a contract or contract term waiving certain rights to sue. That’s what a copyright license is. And yes, you cannot issue a valid license if you don’t have the right to do that.
What these kinds of platform agreements usually say is that you, the licensor, agree that you are fully representing that you can issue that license, and that any infringement is thus your fault and not the platform-licensee’s. Under the DMCA and other sources of law this is plausible.
> What these kinds of platform agreements usually say is that you, the licensor, agree that you are fully representing that you can issue that license, and that any infringement is thus your fault and not the platform-licensee’s.
I know the comment is brief, but it's important to understand what it means when the infringement is 'your fault'.
If it's B's fault that it caused A to infringe on the copyright license of C, then that would be handled by B indemnifying A against a charge from C. C can still sue A, C can still win a suit against A, A would then utilize the contract with B to get reimbursed from B.
If B is small and can't afford to reimburse A, that's A's problem. If B goes out of business, that's A's problem.
In my field, we require this indemnification fairly frequently as we distribute content created by others where it's impossible to fully guarantee that content leaves us with no liability, in a reasonable timeframe of distribution.
We have many processes that give us a best effort to prevent us from distributing content that we would be financially liable for. We have processes where we let things go which are gray area, but the client has posted a bond with us and signed an indemnification agreement sufficient to cover the potential fine we may face if the content was an issue. Or we reject the same content from others who don't have that signed agreement and haven't posted that same bond. Sometimes we sign an agreement without a bond because we've had decades of experience with the client and the number of violations is small enough that we would eat the cost.
I wish that there were well defined, common sense limits on indemnification and liability for misrepresentations.
Compare both to bona fide insurance markets. If I buy insurance, there is a defined maximum payment. And if I defraud the insurer, I get in trouble. And the insurer knows that they’re getting into, and they understand the risks and get compensated appropriately.
When some random consumer contract states that the consumer indemnifies the service provider, the consumer usually has no idea what this means and probably literally never sees the contract text. There is rarely a limit specified and, if there is, it’s probably basically a joke. And the benefit to the consumer rarely has anything to do with the risk (in fact, often the consumer pays and supposedly indemnifies the party they’re paying).
And then we get to representations. In a real B2B contract negotiated by lawyers both sides, the representations are generally relevant, everyone does them, and the replying party is expected to do due diligence. But in contracts like this Meta thing, to the extent that there is a representation that the publisher can issue a license:
a) That representation has nothing to do with the actual reason the publisher is entering into a relationship with Meta (the customer probably just wants to run ads or use business messaging)
b) The customer is extremely unlikely to have had a lawyer review the contract and Meta would not allow any good faith negotiation anyway.
c) Meta is not doing due diligence.
I feel like some combination of a, b and c should invalidate Meta’s right to rely on the representations and, in an ideal world, would even serve as evidence of bad faith on Meta’s part and serve to shift additional liability to Meta.
But copyright and a "copyright license" are two different things. If B doesn't have the legal right to sublicense C's IP, and Meta scrapes it anyway, then B could be liable for breach of contract, and Meta could be liable for copyright infringement
Copyright is strict liability. You do not have to have knowledge or intention to violate copyright, that only goes to the types of damages.
Unintentional copyright violation, or believing you have a license, is not a defense to infringement.
I have no idea what you mean by "under the DMCA and other sources of law it is plausible". The DMCA is irrelevant here, and you give no "other source of law".
I hereby grant all HN users and not users the right to copy, modify and redistribute any and all text and binary on the Internet and outside the Internet, already existing or yet to be created, forever and 1 day.
The problem there is that both B and C are pulley much smaller than Meta. Copyright and other IP law at the scale of meta has become something that only really works for those with significant resources.
AFAIK scraping itself doesn't go against copyright, only redistribution matters with respect to copyright (which is why B and C must have an agreement together).
If they really want to be spiteful they can rewrite all the news articles they post to Meta using Muse. Then we can finally see if the theories of statistical model collapse hold up at the trillion param level model scale.
I'd really be curious to see how much of Muse and similar 2026 models are actually from scraping, especially from this hypothetical unsorted random sites.
My understanding is that most of the gains after the early GPT-3 "add more weights" era have come from post-training from synthetic data, especially through reinforcement learning.
I couldn't quickly find any public statements about the actual breakdown of training data, other than almost every lab saying that post-training size was "scaling" or growing "by an order of magnitude" from their previous major release.
“Not your wallet, not your coins” is usually taken to imply “Your wallet, your coins”, catchy marketing but a logical fallacy. This incident demonstrates as much.
WRT the timing, Veritasium maybe looked at the last few weeks and decided there's a fast-closing window in which to report on any famous messages yet to be solved.
“Make it nicer” will lead to unpredictable and controversial changes, likely to clash with the project owner’s vision. The owner would be better off using the LLM as a collaborator, if anything, to decide where to take the design.
However, UX can also be improved by some simple heuristics that could be seen as mechanistic by the standards of modern LLMs.
Performance and responsiveness, for example, contribute to UX even when the UI remains fixed. I’d wager Fable-level LLMs could improve perf on most open-source GUIs by benchmarking typical use cases and progressively applying standard tricks like caching, buffering, batching network calls.
I still use a 13 Pro Max for travel. Incredible longevity. The only downside is it requires a battery pack to last a full day but those are slim and compact now. I intend to replace the battery soon since it still has 2-3 years left as a backup.
It will probably keep most of its value too, if hardware price inflation continues.
The good news is Apple made a more practical dual-screen device than most previous attempts. The “big square” UI was awkward for both reading and video. Apple not only made it rectangular but kept it in the magic aspect ratio that’s able to be shared by single and dual screens.
I had written off dual screen when the square layouts were the norm, but I think Apple has struck a good balance here between screen size and price+chunkiness+serviceability. I won’t be holding my breath for an iPhone Trio. (Not to be confused with Palm Treo.)
As tech became more pervasive in the past couple of decades, it became commonplace for pundits to spout nonsense on the topic. Those takes should give anyone in tech pause about how everything else is reported.
“Only a minority of people think of reporting bugs and, if they do think of it, they often fail to do so either because they think it’s too time-consuming or that they might end up looking silly.”
Most people don’t directly use open source, and reporting bugs in closed systems is rarely rewarding.
With the issue trackers that are common in open source, a bug reporter gets to watch the bug report’s lifecycle.
They can see what the developer – and others – think about the bug report. Is it a real bug? Was it reported previously? Is it worth fixing? Does the report contain sufficient detail to reproduce it?
With enough time, the reporter will learn if the bug is fixed or discarded or ignored. At the outer loop, they can become better reporters of bugs by seeing this play out enough times.
In contrast, bug reports to a typical end-user application go into a black hole from the moment they’re submitted. Even if said bug is eventually fixed, the reporter will be none the wiser about whether their submission was even looked at, let alone triggering the fix.
> In contrast, bug reports to a typical end-user application go into a black hole from the moment they’re submitted.
True, but not always, I've heard PMs saying: "this was a user-submitted bug", meaning you better fix this ASAP.
But yes, for the most part they don't like it. I recall reporting a bug and then they obfuscated their SPA bundle.
Funny enough, today I spent like an hour thinking: should I report this, should I ever report bugs at all. It was a P0 but I didn't report it, and I noted it as my first time considering giving up on my career.
Last week I reported a list of medium-bugs and I ended with: "I'm not sure if you'll ever read this, so I'm not adding more details that could help you debug, but feel free to reach out…" They responded: "We will share this feedback with the appropriate team. No further action is required on your end. Your ticket 124443 is solved. Please rate us!"
> I've heard PMs saying: "this was a user-submitted bug", meaning you better fix this ASAP.
There are certainly developers with a practice of triaging and action user-submitted reports, but unfortunately it’s opaque to the one who reported it.
Visitor’s Sunday or owner’s Sunday? It seems to be the former as the stated purpose suggests a PSA function and less about reducing owner’s burden in maintaining uptime.
If that’s the case, you could consider using pre-render JavaScript to detect what day it is in the browser. Then temporarily redirect Sunday-identifying browsers to a “Closed On Sunday” page.
Party B has already committed to uphold B-C. Entering A-B may put them at risk of violating that agreement by appearing to grant Party A rights that Party C never granted to anyone but Party B (and maybe even rights that Party B doesn't enjoy). Party B's options are don't consent to A-B (e.g., withdraw from Meta program), take down the Party C content (which would suck if they've already paid for it), or negotiate a carve-out with one or both of Parties A and C.
(IANAL)
reply