Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is An Attack On The Open Internet

I hate this timeline.

Let’s break this down, because we have to look at how crazy this is.

• They’re saying that these companies are “avoiding or bypassing” Reddit’s TCMs. But, the way they’re doing that is by not scraping Reddit. You cannot claim that it is “circumventing a TCM” to get the same content… from Google. That’s crazy.
• Even crazier is that they’re arguing that the defendants are circumventing Google’s TCM, even though Google isn’t even a party.
• They’re making this claim over content that Reddit holds no copyright over. The copyright remains with the original creator. Reddit holds a license, but a license does not grant Reddit the right to sue over that copyright.

Each one of these ideas is crazy. All three of them together is ludicrous. Reddit is claiming that these companies violated copyright law by (1) avoiding Reddit and (2) getting the content from publicly available Google searches over (3) content that Reddit has no copyright over.

And somehow that’s supposed to be copyright infringement.