[jolmg]

> Once you take someone's copyrighted work and you do anything with it without consent, you're breaking some implicit trust.

While I agree there's a parallel, do consider what that trust is with regards to putting up an HTTP server. It's kind of like handing out flyers you made yourself. The server is yours and you're handing out your content on your own. Someone is going around accepting such flyers and putting them in their pocket (HTTP cache, maybe a browser's, maybe an indexer's). Then somebody asks them where they might find a barber, and they remember one such flyer was about barbers and they show them the flyer or part of it.

What implicit trust was broken? This is HTTP, the online equivalent of handing out flyers.

Part of the problem here is that copyright is quite a broken concept. That's why it's got such big wiggle room as "fair use" and such.

[dvt]

Funny example, because if you create a flyer, you own the copyright to said flyer :) So if you create a flyer, then if someone else uses that flyer to make money, you can sue them and you will win in court (unless the derived work is transformative, critiques it, yadda yadda). And this is the kind of hair-splitting that can get you into trouble, because I think it's trivial that ChatGPT's training is certainly more transformative than Google's indexing/PageRank, but we're somehow more upset at the latter than we are at the former.

[jolmg]

> then if someone else uses that flyer to make money, you can sue them and you will win in court (unless the derived work is transformative, critiques it, yadda yadda).

Not a lawyer, but 1) consider that sharing flyers is the normal use of the thing, and it's precisely what the business wants, to have their marketing spread to whoever needs them. 2) Doubt there's a law that whatever permission you implicitly granted by personally handing your work is revoked as soon as they find a way to make money from it. 3) This is kind of Groupon's business model: to group coupons (which business flyers also typically are). It benefited the businesses and I don't think Groupon needed to pay the businesses for a copyright license to do them the favor of furthering their marketing. Rather Groupon got better deals from the businesses because Groupon had better reach. They had better reach because people that wanted coupons to save money could just buy the little booklet instead of driving around collecting one or two at different locations.

[dvt]

You're confusing distribution with copyright. Even free flyers or public YouTube videos are copyrighted. If you draw a flyer then I use that flyer as a cover for a book I'm selling, you will likely win in court. (I say likely because it's up to the judge, but there's a lot of case law here.)

> permission you implicitly granted

There is nothing you implicitly grant anyone, except for ownership (which is explicit, because I gave the thing to you).

[munk-a]

If you've been following pop news there's actually a really interesting parallel to this in the lego case. Assuming the legos were consigned, assuming they were physically transferred with the store when the ownership changed, and assuming the new owners or sellers knew or had cause to know that they were consigned goods... the new owners of the store had absolutely no right to claim them as their property. Just because you physically have something it doesn't mean you own it - if you've ever heard that famously oversimplified saying "Possession is 9/10ths of the law" both consignment and distribution with limited rights are cases where we're talking about that last tenth.

[dvt]

Totally correct, though I do think a contract was signed in the LEGO case you're referencing. So "common law 9/10ths" doesn't even come into play here because people signed stuff.