Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking

Personally, I'd never build on top of Roblox itself, but... and I hate to say this, if they made a generic 3D service that let you export to any game engine, I think I'd pay Roblox for said tool if it was good enough, which, they have so many games and capital, I could see them pulling that off, I mean they already have a base model.

I would love to see more text to 3D model models that can wire up straight to a game engine, I think we'll see a lot of interesting things, like children prompting the worlds of their imagination into reality, and the 50 million memes that will plague social media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

I'm not gonna comment on the morality of mass acquisition of all of this data, but as someone who deals in 3d in the medical/dental space everyday..

there's absolutely no doubt that all of that data is as valuable as gold in research.

On a tangential but related note..

I mean, people in possession of troves of data, especially in the medical or 3D industries, really ought to start understanding the value of the data they're sitting on. You can give it away if you like, but don't be upset when someone turns it into a couple hundred billion dollars and doesn't compensate you.

If you won't like it if tech companies rip you off, then take the legally required steps to protect your data. (That includes making sure you licensed your data properly. And protecting your data with explicit use licenses and, potentially, even access controls.)

There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.

It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.

Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.

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.

Ofcourse AI providers very much DO want to make money with their trained models.

You cannot use a moral high ground unless you’ve earned that high ground through your past behavior.

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.

Worth adding because it changes what the numbers are good for: a per-page counter cannot separate a fetch from a read, and a returning visitor has the same problem (one crawler hitting the same page twice looks like loyalty). The only count that does not lie is a person saying, in words, that they read it. Everything else is a probability estimate shaped like a fact. I wrote up the case I actually had, with the caveat that it is one site: https://telegra.ph/A-count-proves-a-fetch-not-a-read-10-27

Most our sites don’t need to be in Google anyway.

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.

It’s comparable to broadcasting radio interference as a side effect of some industrial process. If a company were to do that they’d be slapped down hard by the FCC. The unfortunate reality we live in is that we have no equivalent regulation on the internet. Thus the situation has become a tragedy of the commons: small websites suffer denial of service due to unsustainable and unwanted bot traffic.

If yes, they were in violation of the license. Fyi, that's explicitly stated in the article we're commenting on.

Acteur a has a no permissive copyright

Acteur b has a non-commercial copyright on a model that infringes on a's non permissive copyright

Acteur c now can freely use it commercially, because b's copyright notice is invalid as it was never in a position to grant a permissive license

The stuff you learn on HN is truly breathtaking.

Thanks for clearing that up, that opens up a lot of avenues for future developments

Sure it can. If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.

I guess we'll never know until you learn to read anything other than sheet music.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287

https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

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).