Technology

I understand (to agree degree) going after AI companies for reproducing the lyrics in a way that would not normally be protected by copyright but outright scraping is going too far from a moral standpoint.

There’s a good argument to be made about abusing their resources to do the scraping as I’ve heard complaints of site owners getting overwhelmed by AI crawlers but provided you’re not doing that I think scraping should be allowed generally speaking even if the operator disallows it, since without that search engines break and archival (especially to prove malice) go out the window.

I’m inclined to take an approach of “you can ingest whatever you want, but you are liable for reproduction, and if preventing reproduction is too onerous, then you probably should get the licences to permit it or don’t ingest that data”. Even that has some caveats since that reasoning would decimate social media services and personal/community spaces if actually enforced which is kinda what Safe Harbor helps protect.