Scraping publicly available content is not and has never been a copyright violation. As someone else pointed out in this thread, search engines wouldn't exist if that was the case.
But even if it was (which it's not) platforms like Reddit do now own the content. They can not be a gatekeeper to it. The person who posted the content owns it. They have legal standing to sue for copyright infringement, the platform does not.
This article is incredibly self serving, and they try way to hard to paint themselves as the defender of the little guy, but they are fundamentally correct. Reddit winning a case like this would mean every single content hosting website would now have a pathway to claim ownership over user generated content. It does not take someone with a law degree to see why that's a problem.
Scraping publicly available content is not and has never been a copyright violation. As someone else pointed out in this thread, search engines wouldn't exist if that was the case.
But even if it was (which it's not) platforms like Reddit do now own the content. They can not be a gatekeeper to it. The person who posted the content owns it. They have legal standing to sue for copyright infringement, the platform does not.
This article is incredibly self serving, and they try way to hard to paint themselves as the defender of the little guy, but they are fundamentally correct. Reddit winning a case like this would mean every single content hosting website would now have a pathway to claim ownership over user generated content. It does not take someone with a law degree to see why that's a problem.