[HN Gopher] The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data fo...
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The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training
Author : rand0mx1
Score : 214 points
Date : 2023-07-15 11:59 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackdiary.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackdiary.com)
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Fair use is a doctrine in the law of the United States that
| allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring
| permission from the rights holders. It provides for the legal,
| non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in
| another author's work under a four-factor balancing test:
|
| > 1) The purpose and character of the use, including _whether
| such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit
| educational purposes_
|
| > 2) The nature of the copyrighted work
|
| > 3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in
| relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
|
| > 4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value
| of the copyrighted work
|
| [emphasis from TFA]
|
| HN always talks about derivative work and transformativeness, but
| never about these. The fourth one especially seems clear in its
| implications for models.
|
| Regardless, it makes it seem much less clear cut than people here
| often say.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Microsoft is gambling on the hope that model training will be
| ruled fair use. This makes it seem that outcome is unlikely.
| brookst wrote:
| Do you think a human learning something from reading is fair
| use? Or are we all copyright violators because reading that
| article altered our connectomes, and we may recall parts of
| it later?
| ethanbond wrote:
| The point being raised is quite specific. Not sure if
| you're willingly ignoring it or what?
|
| The answer is no, because you reading the article didn't
| dramatically degrade its market value.
|
| An AI ingesting all content on the internet and then being
| ultra-effective at frontrunning that content for a large
| number of future readers _does_ degrade its market value
| (and subsumes it into the model's value).
| everforward wrote:
| This applies to so many things, though.
|
| The most obvious parallel to me is YouTube. There are a
| ton of people ingesting books, then transforming that
| information into a roughly paraphrased video for people
| to watch for free (ish). That devalues the books they
| read and paraphrased, because other people don't need to
| read them.
|
| Spark Notes devalue actual books in a way, because a lot
| of high schoolers read those instead of buying the actual
| book.
|
| Search engines have also supplanted books in large part,
| because I don't need a whole book to answer a specific
| question. I don't know anyone that owns an encyclopedia
| anymore.
|
| This is the next iteration of these processes. Non-novel
| information's market value has been degrading for decades
| now. A series of questions that would have cost thousands
| of dollars in books to answer in the 70's/80's is now
| free, with or without AI.
| ethanbond wrote:
| LLMs are attracting so much _positive_ attention because
| they are likely to be a huge, huge step change
| improvement than all those methods you mention.
|
| For that _same exact reason_ , it's totally reasonable
| they're attracting unique amounts of _negative_ attention
| too.
|
| You can't have it both ways: yes LLMs are going to change
| information retrieval the way nothing else has before,
| but no it's actually just like all the other things in
| terms of their impact on incentive structures.
|
| FWIW I don't really know where I land on this issue. I
| just find it totally incoherent to believe in the bull
| case of "this will transform everything" while also
| portraying it all as par for the course when discussing
| potential negatives.
|
| Just because Spark Notes didn't obviously manage to kill
| valuable parts of our information ecosystem and economy
| does not mean that Spark Notes x 10,000,000 will not.
| cma wrote:
| > The answer is no, because you reading the article
| didn't dramatically degrade its market value.
|
| How about if you read a news article to write a competing
| one rewording and possibly citing it (one of the most
| common practices in news)?
| ethanbond wrote:
| How about it? Do you not think it incurs a lot of
| negative effects?
| [deleted]
| ivalm wrote:
| I disagree. People learning how to draw does degrade the
| future value of copyrighted work. Imagine the future
| where nobody was allowed to learn to draw, existing
| copyright value would skyrocket!
| ethanbond wrote:
| Arguments like this are great for getting your side to go
| "rah rah got 'em" and really, really bad for convincing
| anyone else.
|
| Legal judgments generally focus on actual impacts rather
| than quirks that might exist in hypothetical universes.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| While that may be what your parent intended I'm not
| entirely sure and there does exist the philosophical
| level discussion here. Or market economics level I guess.
|
| If your pool of people that can learn about topic X is
| restricted the outputs or their labor are more expensive.
| Now lift a continent of billions of people out of
| poverty, get them access to schooling, safety etc and see
| the market forces do the rest.
|
| Now equate ChatGPT et al with said billion people. Just
| that it runs on electricity. If quality is good enough of
| course. Which is hard to decide right now because of
| hype.
| civilitty wrote:
| That's not at all clear to me. IANAL but first of all it's a
| balancing test, not a bright-line test. The judge could focus
| on any one factor and make an argument for either side quite
| easily.
|
| Second, "use" here could mean one of two things: training or
| inference. It's publishing the results of inference that can
| lead to actual effects on the market, not the training.
|
| At the end of the day, someone has to prove tangible harm.
| amluto wrote:
| I would look at #1 here. Crawling the Internet to collect
| information is one thing. (And people putting text on the web
| without requiring authentication seem to be granting at least
| some kind of license to anyone who sends a GET request.). But
| crawling the Internet (via centralized robots or users'
| browsers), then storing that data and _charging money to others
| for rights to that data_ (as Brave seems to be doing, quite
| explicitly) seems like it deserves a very different evaluation
| under factor #1.
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| Unpopular opinion time:
|
| A ML model is clearly a derivative work of its input.
|
| Here's what I think would be fair:
|
| Anyone who holds copyright in something used as part of a
| training corpus is owed a proportional share of the cash flow
| resulting from use of the resulting models. (Cash flow, not
| profits, because it's too easy to use accounting tricks to make
| profits disappear).
|
| In the case of intermediaries (e.g., social media like reddit &
| twitter) those intermediaries could take a cut before passing
| it on to the original authors.
|
| Obviously hellishly difficult to administer so it's unlikely to
| happen but I don't see a better answer.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > A ML model is clearly a derivative work of its input.
|
| Do you mean this in a copying sense or a mathematical sense?
|
| What if it's only storing 1 byte per input document?
| mattbee wrote:
| I don't know what a fair settlement would be but I'm looking
| forward to a copyright-holder suing OpenAI to obtain one.
| These companies have no value if copyright can be enforced on
| their training data.
| visarga wrote:
| I think there are ways around it. The simplest would be to
| generate replacement data, for example by paraphrasing the
| original, or summarising, or turning it into question-
| answer pairs. In this new format it can serve as training
| data for a clean LLM. Of course the public domain data
| would be used directly, no need to go synthetic there.
|
| An important direction would be to train copyright
| attribution models, and diff-models to detect when a work
| is infringing on another, by direct comparison. They would
| be useful to filter both the training set and the model
| outputs.
| mattbee wrote:
| Would automated paraphrasing not be a derivative work of
| the original?
| FishInTheWater wrote:
| The entire fair use claim is derived not from any legal basis,
| but rather, that "it has to be fair use" because it would be
| legally catastrophic for OpenAI et al if it weren't true.
|
| If you look at the core argument in favour of fair use, it's
| that "LLMs do not copy the training data", yet this is
| obviously false.
|
| For Github copilot and ChatGPT examples of it reciting large
| sections of training data are well known. Plenty can be found
| on HN. It doesn't generate a new valid windows serial key on
| the fly, it's memorized them.
|
| If one wants to be cynical, it's not hard to see OpenAI/etc
| patching in filters to remove copyrighted content from the
| output precisely because it's legally catastrophic for their
| "fair use" claim to have the model spit out copyrighted
| content. As this is both copyright infringement by itself, and
| evidence that no matter how the internals of these models work,
| they store some of the training data anyway.
| twoodfin wrote:
| It actually doesn't even matter if LLMs reproduce copyrighted
| data from their training. The issue is that a _human_ copied
| the data from its source into memory for use in training, and
| this copy was likely not fair use under cases like _MAI
| Systems_.
|
| The Supreme Court hasn't ruled on a software case like this,
| as far as I know. But given the recent 7-2 decision against
| Andy Warhol's estate for his copying of photographs of
| Prince, this doesn't seem like a Court that's ready to say
| copying terabytes of unlicensed material for a commercial
| purpose is OK.
|
| I'm going to guess this ends with Congress setting up some
| kind of clearinghouse for copyrighted training material: You
| opt in to be included, you get fees from OpenAI when they use
| what you added. This isn't unprecedented: Congress set up
| special rules and processes for things like music recordings
| repeatedly over the years.
|
| https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt.
| ..
| gyudin wrote:
| So how is that supposed to work with people sending it
| legally obtained copyrighted materials for an analyze?
| twoodfin wrote:
| That copy (the "send") would be evaluated under the same
| fair use criteria.
|
| "Write a review of this short story: ..." - probably
| fine.
|
| "Rewrite this short story to have a happier ending: ..."
| - probably not.
| luma wrote:
| How does that align with Google Books scanning libraries
| full of copyrighted text, offering full reproductions of
| sections of the work, and then having the supreme court
| declare it all to be Fair Use? I think that is a far more
| relevant precedent here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au
| thors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Google also bought copies of each book, I believe, which
| makes it another step removed from standard ML practice.
| twoodfin wrote:
| The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on appeal,
| which is a shade different from endorsing the decision
| after a hearing.
|
| That being said, it doesn't take a lot of effort to
| differentiate these cases. Google was indexing
| copyrighted works and providing access to limited
| extracts. They weren't transforming them into new works
| and then selling access to those new works over APIs.
| luma wrote:
| OpenAI is also providing access to limited extracts.
| Google wasn't selling this over an API, they were
| providing "free" access to it while displaying ads to the
| user. Would the courts see this manner of monetization to
| be different enough that settled case law wouldn't apply?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| OpenAI's bias research on DALL-E revealed that most examples
| of regurgitation come from repeated copies of the same image
| in the training set. When they filtered out duplicates,
| DALL-E stopped drawing training examples.
|
| The problem is that filtering the training set is naively
| O(n^2) and n is already extremely large for DALL-E. For LLMs,
| it's comically huge, plus now you have to do substring
| search. I've yet to hear OpenAI talk about training set
| deduplication in the context of LLMs.
|
| As for the legal basis... nobody's ruled on AI training sets
| in the US. Even the Google Books case that I've heard cited
| in the past (even by myself) really only talks about
| searching a large corpus of text. If OpenAI's GPT models were
| really just a powerful search engine and not intelligent at
| all, they'd actually be more legally protected.
|
| My money's still on "training is fair use", but that actually
| doesn't help OpenAI all that much either, because fair use is
| not transitive. Right now, such a ruling would mean that
| using AI art is Russian roulette: if your model regurgitates,
| the outputs are still infringing, even if the model is fair
| use. Novel outputs aren't entirely safe, though. A judge
| willing to commit the Butlerian Jihad[0] might even say that
| regurgitation _does not matter_ and that all AI outputs are
| derivative works of the entire training set[1].
|
| This logic would also apply in the EU. Last I checked the TDM
| exception only said training is legal, not that you could
| sell the outputs. They don't really respect jurisprudence the
| way the Anglosphere obsesses over "precedent", so copyright
| exceptions are almost always decided by legislatures and not
| judges over there, and the likelihood of a judge saying that
| all outputs are derivative works of the training set
| regardless of regurgitation is higher.
|
| [0] In the sci-fi novel Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a
| galaxy-wide purge of all computer technology for reasons that
| are _surprisingly pertinent_ to the AI art debate.
|
| Yes, this is also why /r/Dune banned AI art. No, I have not
| read Dune.
|
| [1] If the opinion was worded poorly this would mean that
| even human artists taking inspiration to produce legally
| distinct works would be violating copyright. The idea-
| expression divide would be entirely overthrown in favor of a
| dictatorship of the creative proletariat.
|
| [2] "Music and Film Industry Association of America" - an
| abbreviation coined for an April Fools joke article about the
| MPAA and RIAA merging together.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > The problem is that filtering the training set is naively
| O(n^2)
|
| There are standard ways to do it that are O(n), FYI.
| richk449 wrote:
| > A judge willing to commit the Butlerian Jihad[0] might
| even say that regurgitation does not matter and that all AI
| outputs are derivative works of the entire training set[1].
|
| A judge can't "commit" the butlierian jihad. A jihad is a
| mass event caused by some fraction of the population
| believing in some cause.
|
| Which kinda gets to a point that seems to be missed.
| Copyright law is not "intrinsic" - nobody thinks that
| copyright is a natural law - it is just a pragmatic
| implementation which balances various public and private
| goods. If the world changes such that the law no longer
| does a good job of balancing the various goods, then either
| the law will get changed or people will ignore the law.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Copyright is a unique case in which the law represents a
| bargain struck in the 1970s that hasn't been updated
| since. Everyone ignores it because it's nearly impossible
| to actually enforce copyright on individual infringers.
| But that doesn't mean copyright is meaningless: any
| activity which is large enough to be _legible_ [0] to the
| state _will_ be forced to bend itself to fit within the
| copyright bargain.
|
| And AI training is _extremely_ legible. This is not like
| a bunch of people downloading stuff off BitTorrent. All
| of the large foundation models we use were trained by a
| large corporation with a source of venture capital
| funding which could be easily shut off by a sufficiently
| motivated government. Weights-available and liberally
| licensed models exist, but most improvements on them are
| _fine-tuning_. Anonymous individuals can fine-tune an LLM
| or art generator with a small amount of data and compute,
| but they cannot make meaningful improvements on the state
| of the art.
|
| So our sufficiently motivated copyright judge could at
| least effectively freeze AI art in time until Big Tech
| and the MAFIAA agree on how to properly split the
| proceeds from screwing over individual artists.
|
| "Butlerian Jihad" is a term from a book, so you don't
| need to take "jihad" literally. However, I will point out
| that there is a significant fraction of the population
| that does want to see AI permanently banned from creative
| endeavors. The loss of ownership over their work from
| having it be in the training set is a factor, but their
| main argument is that they specifically want to keep
| their current jobs as they are. They do not want to be
| replaced with AI, nor do they want to replace their
| existing drawing work with SEO keyword stuffed text-to-
| image prompts.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Brave continues to be shady. They claim to respect robots.txt but
| don't identify their crawler if you want to block it.
|
| > They don't mention their crawler anywhere in their docs,
| either. So, if you wanted to block Brave from crawling and
| indexing and ultimately selling your content to third parties,
| your only option for the time being would be to block all
| crawlers, which is how Brave would be able to "respect
| robots.txt".
| lopatin wrote:
| Why use brave if my info is already being leaked by third
| parties? E.g. experian. Is it worth the inconvenience and their
| repeated tricky attempts at monetizing their security conscious
| niche? Not being facetious, just a real question from a non
| security conscious person.
| soundnote wrote:
| You get degoogled Chromium with e2ee bookmarks etc. sync and a
| lot of nice convenience features like vertical tabs and mobile
| background video playback.
|
| And if it's your cup of tea, they let you straight up pay money
| for the search engine.
| asynchronous wrote:
| It's built in Ad blocker and other features are heads and tails
| above anything else I've used before, personally.
| kodah wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: the next iteration of privacy laws needs to
| factor in AI. If AI is allowed to slurp up PII or derogative
| works and the people defending it defend it with the zeal of
| cryptobros then we're in for a decade of real pain in terms of
| both copyright law, PII, and IP exposure.
| FishInTheWater wrote:
| The fun part is that the GDPR already does. The answer is _you
| 're not allowed to use personal data for AI_. (And "personal
| data" here covers things like _all public social media posts_ )
|
| Facebook recently got told by the CJEU that, no, they can't use
| people's posts to target advertisements. Even if those ads are
| what's paying for the platform. That you can't claim such
| processing as "part of the contract" unless it is absolutely
| necessary in the same way the post office needs an address to
| send a parcel.
|
| If Facebook can't even do that, there is no way LLMs will be
| allowed. (And remember. The GDPR does not care if your system
| doesn't distribute personal data. Any kind of processing at all
| falls under the GDPR's requirements)
|
| OpenAI is already being chased by the EU's privacy agencies.
| Right now they're in the process of asking pointed questions,
| things will heat up after that.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| End result: EU AI enjoyers use a VPN plus a US-based credit
| card borrowed from a friend.
| asynchronous wrote:
| AI is going to do that irregardless- the debate is essentially
| going to revolve around how and what people can make new
| commercial works from that data.
| k__ wrote:
| The websites a Brave user browses are anonymously relayed to
| their servers for indexing/training. So, they crawl the web
| without a crawler and the website operators can't do anything
| about it.
|
| That's genius!
| jonathansampson wrote:
| I'm Sampson, from the Brave team. The Web Discovery Project is
| a clever approach. For Brave to compete with Google, and offer
| a truly novel index of the Web, a novel approach must be taken.
| The WDP is an opt-in, privacy-preserving approach which gives
| Brave a fighting chance against the Search incumbants. Due to
| our preference of "Can't be evil" over "Don't be evil," the WDP
| is not only designed with privacy and anonymity as a
| prerequisite, but it is also open-source for public scrutiny
| and evaluation: https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project.
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| .es?
| ricardo81 wrote:
| My entirely biased opinion is https://www.mojeek.com/ - a
| traditional search engine crawler (as in, follow links on the
| web) that identifies its user agent. Dead Simple.
| niemandhier wrote:
| This discussion on fair use are always quite anglocentric.
|
| Atricle 3 and 4 of the EU 'Copyright in the Digital Single
| Market' give data miners quite extensive rights.
|
| Move operation to the EU, train a foundational model, than train
| a constitutional model based on that.
|
| As much as I hate the upcoming AI regulation, the CDSM is solid.
|
| https://academic.oup.com/grurint/article/71/8/685/6650009
| https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj
|
| Update: Fixed wrong link
| pedrocr wrote:
| It's not clear that "data mining" covers this use. These models
| are huge, big enough that they can just contain direct copies
| of copyrighted works. They've been shown to reproduce them
| relatively easily. The argument is that they've actually
| generalized enough or learned enough that they're now no longer
| the sum of the dataset. I can definitely see that being
| possible but the way the technology works it's really hard to
| know if that has happened or if what's happening instead is a
| bunch of copyright washing.
|
| There are some things that would make for good faith displays
| by the players in the space. For example, Microsoft has been
| investing a lot and yet their code offering is not trained on
| their internal code base. Same for Google. Start by doing that
| and I'll entertain the argument that your tools are fair use or
| data mining.
| niemandhier wrote:
| My reading of the relevant laws would actually lead me to
| believe that this is not a problem, as long as those
| reproductions are not returned and the eights holder did not
| opt out. But courts might decide differently.
|
| Regarding the copyright of returned material here is a good
| discussion:
|
| https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/05/09/generative-.
| ..
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _as long as those reproductions are not returned_
|
| That's the author's entire gripe. Brave reproduced a
| Wikipedia entry without attribution and then slapped a
| copyright on it to boot.
| pedrocr wrote:
| That's clearly not enough. There's a continuum between
| producing exact input copy and having genuine creativity
| because the model actually learned something. A model that
| just reformats code and changes all the variable names
| would pass your test and yet be clearly a copyright
| violation. This whole argument requires that the neural
| network weights do something creative because they learned
| from the code instead of just transforming it. We're even
| careful about this with humans with things like clean room
| reimplementations to make sure.
| hartator wrote:
| > Simply observe the event in which a user does a query q in
| Brave and then, within one hour, does the same query on a
| different search engine. What we do is to move the script that
| detects bad-queries to the browser, run it against the queries
| that the user does in real-time and then, when all conditions are
| met, send the following data back to our servers.
|
| Wait. Brave browser sends back to Brave Search engine about your
| browsing? Other search engines usage, but also crawl pages on
| your computer to help build their search index?
|
| Ref: https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-
| project/blob/main/mod...
| w0ts0n wrote:
| This is (importantly) opt-in.
|
| "Brave doesn't follow the sneaky practices of other big tech
| search engines. The Web Discovery Project is opt-in, and the
| data collected under the Web Discovery Project has specific
| protections to ensure anonymity." per
| https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
| drusepth wrote:
| This specific feature is already opt-in, but historically the
| answer has always been "yes" for dozens of 'features' like this
| that fly under the radar until users start complaining, and
| then eventually get converted to opt-in or removed in order to
| save face.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| It's always surprising to me when I hear people using the brave
| browser... It's by a company that initially tried to replace
| their blocked ads with their own "safe and non-intrusive" ads
| as far as I remember, until they backpaddled because of the
| outrage.
|
| It's also a for-profit company and you're not the customer, as
| you're not paying them money.
|
| I'd be way more worried how they're using the data they're
| collecting on you vs Google or MS
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| We have these cropping up like ants.
|
| Mullvad
|
| Brave
|
| Opera
|
| Vivaldi
|
| Microsoft
|
| Heck zoho is in on a browser now
|
| What net gain does each of these companies provide over
| skinning chromium that isn't in Firefox?
|
| Last time I asked brave fanboys why they don't redskin
| Firefox and the response was "Firefox is pita to build" all
| the while we have projects like palemoon and waterfox that
| are hobby projects. If they can work with firefox, so could
| someone else but no
| ArclightMat wrote:
| Mullvad is actually a Firefox fork and it directly uses
| Tor's privacy enhancements[0] to Firefox for a private web
| browsing experience. As a matter of fact, it really looks
| like Tor Browser but with a VPN baked in instead of Tor.
|
| [0] https://mullvad.net/en/browser
| soundnote wrote:
| Brave literally started on Gecko.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Is brave currently forking chromium or not?
|
| By your logic, opera was having their own engine till
| 2013. So what?
| throwawayadvsec wrote:
| opera offers a free vpn and builtin adblocker
|
| i would use it daily if the UI/UX was better, or more
| similar to firefox
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| If am not wrong, Opera is owned by some Chinese company
| and they are known for doing some really shady stuff
| [0][1] in African countries.
|
| [0] https://blogs.opera.com/africa/2022/05/free-data-
| with-opera-...
|
| [1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/21/opera-
| predatory-loa...
| KORraN wrote:
| True, right now lots of folks from the original Opera
| team (including CEO) work on Vivaldi. If one day Mozilla
| forces me to ditch Firefox, I will probably switch to
| this browser.
| rglullis wrote:
| Have you worked in _any_ project that required a forked
| browser?
|
| I did. When we folded less than two years later, one of the
| CTOs biggest stated regrets was that he went with Firefox
| instead of Chromium. The extension story in Firefox was
| easily 10x harder. Interfacing with the OS as well. Getting
| dbus services to work was a fool's errand.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Cool so your company folded but as I said, palemoon and
| waterfox seem to be running just fine.
|
| Thunderbird also works.
|
| I happen to own a brwoser extension and have both
| chromium and Firefox extensions. I kinda know myself.
| rglullis wrote:
| > palemoon and waterfox seem to be running just fine.
|
| GNU/Hurd is also a very interesting alternative OS, the
| design is a lot more elegant than GNU/Linux, it's still
| under active development and it has a surprising number
| of active users.
|
| It's still a very bad idea to build the foundation of
| your tech stack on it.
| cempaka wrote:
| > _I 'd be way more worried how they're using the data
| they're collecting on you vs Google or MS_
|
| Why? They don't even have access to my emails and texts like
| those other companies do. I also don't see the names of their
| top executives and founders showing up in articles about
| connections to Jeffrey Epstein every few months.
| nicce wrote:
| People still like to defend Brave when it gets caught on
| shady things over and over again. I guess there are no too
| many other options. For some people it is already too
| difficult to install uBlock or know its existence.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| It's because a lot of people are bought into BAT (Brave's
| cryptocurrency) and have a strong financial incentive to
| shill Brave.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| BAT gives like no money, especially after the crypto
| crash. Its far more likely its just the browser wars of
| old, but with even less options to choose from people are
| going to be more adamant their choice is the best.
| tokai wrote:
| Ah that makes sense why brave fans post a bit like
| cryptobros.
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| I do not use BAT or any crypto. Brave just works, and it
| blocks ads automatically when I tell friends to install
| it on their computers.
|
| I used to recommend Firefox, but Mozilla has totally
| jumped the shark (privacy violations [multiple], wastes
| too much money, blocks APIs that are useful with no real
| security risks while approving APIs with little use that
| do have security risks, etc, very user hostile).
|
| Chromium is obviously not trustworthy at this point, let
| alone Chrome. So that leaves like, Safari and Opera?
|
| Brendan Eich is the CEO of Brave, and I trust him.
| Mozilla was good until he was ousted for political
| reasons.
| nicce wrote:
| > Chromium is obviously not trustworthy at this point,
| let alone Chrome. So that leaves like, Safari and Opera
|
| Brave is like 99% of Chromium + uBlock...
| boondoggle16 wrote:
| Right, I should have said "the main Chromium branch is
| obviously not trustworthy". It is possible to remove the
| untrustworthy bits, however, and there are a variety of
| de-googled Chromium builds.
|
| Chromium is a great browser, unfortunately the official
| branch has been poisoned by Google.
| rglullis wrote:
| You are a victim of the Mandella effect. There never was
| anything related to replacing ads in-page, yet if you ask all
| detractors what they don't like about it, that's the first
| point they bring up.
| impissedoff1 wrote:
| I think some initial news articles claimed this and
| everyone went with it. Which is basically how it worked,
| replacing ads, but in a different way, and actually more
| annoying.. block everyone else's ads...and have their own
| little popup ads, and if you enabled that, you'd get paid
| in BAT tokens per view too.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| As a detractor and therefore a part of the set "all
| detractors", I do not believe this. I just don't buy their
| shady marketing and try not to support engine monoculture.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| They don't replace ads in-page, but they do something very
| very similar.
|
| They block the in-page ads and instead provide their own
| ads through popup notifications.
|
| So they are replacing advertisements on websites.
| rglullis wrote:
| Every time this comes up, the argument is the same.
| People always forget:
|
| - The ad blocker works separately from their own ad
| service.
|
| - Their own ads are opt-in.
|
| - People _receive_ 70% of the revenue from the ads they
| see.
|
| - The ads from Brave do not track you and whatever
| personalisation happens in-device, no data is mined.
|
| So, no. They are not "replacing" anything. They are not
| stealing anyone's revenue (and no matter how much Linus
| from LTT argues, he is not entitled to any revenue just
| because I watched any of his videos) and Brave's own ads
| are from deals that they closed themselves and a
| essentially fraud-proof compared with whatever payouts
| are given by largest ad networks.
|
| In other words, they are just offering something that
| happens to be infinitely more user-focused than the
| status quo. Every attempt at framing this as unethical
| came from an uninformed or biased source.
| tokai wrote:
| Seems you're wrong. Here's an archive link to Braves page
| in '16 were their planned add replacement is explained:
|
| https://archive.md/W0k4j
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| One minor note: they made a slight change in plans from
| that initial design.
|
| How it works now is that when Brave replaces an ad, they
| put the new ad in a popup, not in-page
| rglullis wrote:
| Correct. I've been using Brave since their very first
| versions on the desktop, and there never was any in-page
| ad insertion.
|
| The one type of in-page modification they used to do is
| that they would add a "tip" button to the content creator
| of some social networks like Twitter or reddit. That had
| nothing to do with "replacing ads" though.
|
| > replaces an ad, they put the new ad in a popup
|
| Incorrect. There is no 1:1 replacement. You as the user
| can define how often you want to receive notifications,
| and even then the notifications only come when you are
| switching context between any action. It won't interrupt
| you while you are watching a video, working on google doc
| spreadsheet or reading though HN.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| You're responding to a comment that gave you a link to
| their inital plan, which was literally replacing the ads.
|
| click on it, your horizon might be broadened by the added
| knowledge.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That was their original plan, yes.
|
| lalaland1125 is making claims about what they actually
| did, and those claims are not correct.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "replaces an ad, they put the new ad"
|
| That's not how it works. If you turn on Brave ads, they
| show up every once in a while, completely independently
| of webpage ads. And they work whether your ad blocker is
| on or off.
| jrmg wrote:
| If you don't trust Brave then, yeah, they could be doing
| anything in the browser or on their servers - but that snippet
| you quoted is a slightly out of context statement from a big
| document about how they collect data like this, but _don't_
| collect or store it in a way that they could associate it with
| a user.
|
| If you don't trust that they're doing what they say they are,
| then the document doesn't mean anything. Although that would
| also mean the quote is kind of meaningless...
| hartator wrote:
| The rest of the document is worst. They say they are using
| your computer to crawl pages you visit and report back to
| their server. Even Google doesn't do that.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Even Google doesn't do that
|
| At least Bing did, though.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169793
| w0ts0n wrote:
| This is opt-in only. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
| [deleted]
| mx20 wrote:
| How do they detect if someone poisons their data, if they not
| at least associate IP addresses to the data?
| verisimi wrote:
| How long until IP works its way onto ai training data or ais
| themselves? Ie that for some specific instance, the training is
| intentionally wrong, so as to check and prove that there has been
| a breach of IP.
| homeless_engi wrote:
| Do you mean like trap streets? Seems like a good idea for model
| makers
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Yeah, something like that may be already happening and
| various actors building their cases as we speak.
| DesktopMonitor wrote:
| While not intentionally wrong, Van Halen's brown M&M's rider
| comes to mind as an example of a similar measure.
| the8472 wrote:
| Depends, how do you distinguish humans acquiring knowledge by
| ingesting copyrighted content vs. a human using an AI that
| ingested copyrighted content?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how do you distinguish humans acquiring knowledge by
| ingesting copyrighted content vs. a human using an AI that
| ingested copyrighted content_
|
| Doesn't matter when the content is reproduced verbatim, as
| Brave is doing. If I memorise your content and then repeat it
| as my own, I'm not somehow off the hook for copyright
| violation and plagiarism.
| throwaway72762 wrote:
| I think this title is overstated. It seems like Brave is trying
| to do the right thing here vs other companies that don't even
| make the attempt. (Also, crawling as a service has been a thing
| for a while.)
| jsnell wrote:
| > It seems like Brave is trying to do the right thing here vs
| other companies that don't even make the attempt
|
| I feel like I'm missing something. What the article claims
| they're doing is:
|
| 1. Misrepresenting what rights they have, and selling access to
| those rights.
|
| 2. Stealth-crawling the web, hiding from the webmasters just
| how much Brave is crawling their site, and making it impossible
| to block just their crawler.
|
| How is either of these the right thing? I mean, for somebody
| besides Brave. What "attempt" are they making that other
| companies aren't?
| woah wrote:
| Is there something wrong with accessing information that
| someone has posted for public access?
| theamk wrote:
| Yes. Legalities aside, stripping attribution (author names)
| from contents which specifically requires keeping it, it a
| really shitty thing to do.
|
| (The fact that they include original URL does not change
| much, given that they explicitly market it as "Data for AI"
| and those systems never have attribution)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is there something wrong with accessing information that
| someone has posted for public access?_
|
| The Wikipedia example is glaring. They're scraping content,
| stripping attribution and reselling it with a right to lock
| it down in a way that is not allowed by the original
| license.
|
| Brave is laundering copyleft content while lying to their
| customers by selling a license they can't give. If you'd
| like, you can sidestep the morality of copyright entirely
| and focus on the plagiarism and fraud.
| throwaway72762 wrote:
| I think the first one seems to be a case where Brave just has
| incomplete information about licensing so for the Wikipedia
| data and other CCthey need to provide a link.
|
| The second doesn't seem like a problem to me as long as they
| respect robots.txt
| jsnell wrote:
| You didn't actually answer the question, at best you've
| sidestepped it by claiming that the dodgy shit is either by
| accident, or really not that bad. Maybe so.
|
| But your original claim wasn't just "Brave are technically
| not doing anything illegal" or "they're no worse than the
| others". It was praising them for being _better_ than the
| others, that they 're the only ones trying to do the right
| thing. And for these example it's just not true, they're
| outright worse than the industry standard.
|
| So, to repeat, what makes you think that "Brave is trying
| to do the right thing while other companies aren't even
| attempting"?
| skilled wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. This is one example that
| uses a specific license, there are countless other
| licenses.
|
| And you don't seem to have read the article either, because
| clearly it was explained that they don't respect robots.txt
| because they have no user-agent.
| isodev wrote:
| I firmly believe that corps like these don't deserve the benefit
| of the doubt. Google, Brave and really anyone big enough to allow
| themselves to do bad things and get away with it must adhere to a
| standard where they proactively show their stuff doesn't have
| malicious intents.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| As always, if the product is free, you are the product...
| isykt wrote:
| "Although the saying tells us "If it's free, then you are the
| product," that is also incorrect. We are the sources of
| surveillance capitalism's crucial surplus: the objects of a
| technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-
| material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism's
| actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its
| markets for future behavior."
|
| Excerpt From The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Shoshana
| Zuboff
| woah wrote:
| Did you read the article? This is about a paid web crawling
| api that the author thinks is too good or something. Nothing
| about a free product
| xp84 wrote:
| From article:
|
| > without any worry for copyright infringement because Brave acts
| as a middleman.
|
| This isn't how law works. Unless Brave is explicitly indemnifying
| all their customers (which their lawyers would have to be
| _insane_ to let them do), any trouble you could get in, is going
| to be 100% your problem. Pointing the finger at Brave could
| theoretically get them in trouble too, but would in no way let
| you off the hook.
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