Reddit Inc. is weighing feedback from early meetings with potential investors in its initial public offering that it should consider a valuation of at least $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, even as it is estimated below that figure in the volatile market for shares of private companies.
Scraped data isn’t legal to resell, scraping isn’t even legal in the first place.
Just because you can scrape the data doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.
Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.
If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.
So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.
And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?
If they literally own the original data themselves
Scraping is legal
Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?
The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.
All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).
It’s too late to say with complete certainty that it’s all legal (the appeal processes haven’t all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it’s going to turn out not to be legal, it’s very clear that nobody’s shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it’s been happening for years.
Everything you’ve written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).