Scientists say this is the first occurance of the word "model" in the title of a post on HN that does not refer to a neural network of some sort since 2023
Personally, I'd never build on top of Roblox itself, but... and I hate to say this, if they made a generic 3D service that let you export to any game engine, I think I'd pay Roblox for said tool if it was good enough, which, they have so many games and capital, I could see them pulling that off, I mean they already have a base model.
I would love to see more text to 3D model models that can wire up straight to a game engine, I think we'll see a lot of interesting things, like children prompting the worlds of their imagination into reality, and the 50 million memes that will plague social media.
> I would love to see more text to 3D model models that can wire up straight to a game engine
Same, but none of the models actually have good enough output yet to make that work. Currently they're all aiming to "fake" the niceness by doing modeling+texturing, but when you look at the wireframe, it's pretty clear they're very far of from being usable, even less so in a game where performance matters a great deal, and you can't just YOLO assets however you want, which is what the "text to 3D" models like to do.
Inevitable that we'll get there eventually though, it's miles ahead where it was just 1-2 years ago. I guess my point is that it's not the "3D model > game engine" that is lacking at the moment, but "text > 3D model" that cannot produce high quality enough results.
but I'd prefer to have an industry expert involved, for the accuracy of the model, model to supervise and co-create model trained on models then would generate a model of a model.
As photographer, I find it hard to work with your model. It's like it has no training and just sits there waiting to be told what to do. I spend more time explaining what I want the model to do than actually working with the model. Maybe I should shell out for a professional model instead of working the the open models hoping to be a professional one day.
You laugh, but this is the kind of data that allows you to train models that actually catch a lot of corner cases, as well as generalizing to other 3D applications.
I'm not gonna comment on the morality of mass acquisition of all of this data, but as someone who deals in 3d in the medical/dental space everyday..
there's absolutely no doubt that all of that data is as valuable as gold in research.
On a tangential but related note..
I mean, people in possession of troves of data, especially in the medical or 3D industries, really ought to start understanding the value of the data they're sitting on. You can give it away if you like, but don't be upset when someone turns it into a couple hundred billion dollars and doesn't compensate you.
If you won't like it if tech companies rip you off, then take the legally required steps to protect your data. (That includes making sure you licensed your data properly. And protecting your data with explicit use licenses and, potentially, even access controls.)
If you read the article, you'd find they admit to that, their position is nuanced, and this is not a "gotcha".
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.
"When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply." Well, yes, obviously they have to, or risk not existing anymore.
Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.
From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.
There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?
I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history. But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/
> Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment
And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.
Their infringement is different, and would really be a trademark issue if we hadn’t just invented the idea of copyrighting a character separately from the story they are a part of in the ‘30s (they are not individually copyrightable under the original text).
There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.
It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.
The internet was built on aggregators and crawlers, it only matters when people are not getting paid... I prefer the internet to be unregulated, but whatever greed always wins
I think this is an important point we need to grapple with more and more in the future. We like to think an act as either lawful or not lawful, either ethical or not ethical. We need to bring in scale as a separate axis. There's a world of difference whether an activity is done at human scale or machine scale. At human scale, it's an act of deviance that may contribute to the diversity of human experience. At machine scale, it's a distortion that threatens the society.
But it is okay if not-rich people do it. I have "pirated" and otherwise flaunted copyright my whole life, along with many millions more. Nobody has ever come at me for it. Enforcement of any sort against common people is exceedingly rare. For a long time it was only corporations who took copyright seriously, and now that even they are flaunting copyright people such as yourself suddenly pretend that the little guy has to care.
Well I don't! Copyright is a farce and I continue to wipe my butt with it.
This thread of comments seems to be getting somewhat off topic. I believe the point being made by open3dlabs is that copyright is basically a pay to play system for corporations which is obviously unjust. You're right that copyright isn't enforced on individuals, but DMCA is definitely enforced on small content sharing sites which have little to no recourse compared to large corporations that can flagrantly break the law.
Yep, this is basically the outlook of ChatGPT etc in america, when they try and stop china scraping them. I hope they go bust as soon as possible.
Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.
I have a question/thought/philosophy. If AES is a relatively strong encryption method right now, _why don't we wait to crack the assets until the encryption method is easy to decrypt_? By the time that's possible, the game assets will likely be old as shit, so it would potentially sit better with everyone. If we wait, it takes on a more archival type feeling.
According to the timestamp, that was uploaded less than 24 hours ago.
I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.
their staff posts these things. their staff creates videos of how to rip assets from games. they are fully aware of what their users are doing and they openly encourage it.
Considering you link something that has a non comnercial license CC-by-NC, there might be others with permissive licenses. There might be things in their TOS of the site,
There's more with different licenses. If you scroll through the pages, there are a lot of assets ripped from games, with a variety of licenses CC-by-NC, or just "beerware":
Scroll through the site, there are A LOT of assets from games, packaged by users. It's a nice subtrefuge, in practice it is a place to get ripped assets and the platform washes it's hands.
Again, I don't have any particularly strong issue with this, just with the pearl clutching regarding roblox downloading the data.
Game companies generally don't care if you don't make money from your mods or fan projects. And yes technically copyright nowadays lasts until the heat death of the universe but 10 year old games are in commercial limbo.
Ofcourse AI providers very much DO want to make money with their trained models.
Just remember, the morals of someone making an argument have no bearing on whether an argument is sound.
If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.
If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.
Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things
If you believe in karmic justice, someone who lacked sufficient morals should just lose an argument even if they are now trying to use morals to put forward a sound argument.
You cannot use a moral high ground unless you’ve earned that high ground through your past behavior.
Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
Residential proxies are something that is not supposed to exist.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough?
Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
If the content is legally obtainable, couldn’t any employee use their own home network to pull data? I don’t think anyone would bother with a resi. Employees have their own network connections available.
They exist because of GeoIP databases, and spying on "quality of IP address via ASN".
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
That was not the question.
There are many factors driving crime, yes.
The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.
But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.
First, copyright violation as non-profit is a tort.
Secondly, it's only for-profit copyright violations that are a crime. But as OFCOM learned the hard way, stuff illegal in the US can be legal elsewhere.
Thirdly, for some fucking reason, the US AI companies are immune to criminal statutes of for-profit copyright violations. Job creators, or some bullshit.
And I'm not sure exactly why you're so dead-set on "crime crime crime". It's all politics and manufactured criminality. And well, I don't particularly care if backing up my movies to a Jellyfin and sharing access is "ill eagle".
The AI companies are bulk pirating AND then selling that access.... But I'm the criminal? Fuck that noise.
I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
Who said we control the connecting device? This is a website. Websites are usually pretty arms-length things, and that’s the case with us. They’re our customers but we can’t install certificates on their computers and enforce mTLS. Can you do that with any of your customers?
Some companies don't split because they want all internet traffic to go through their internal MITM proxies to enforce acceptable internet use and data loss policies.
Same, I just checked and this week the vast majority of the bot traffic I get is random residential IPs that all pretend to be the exact same Chrome 155 on Linux.
Same shape here, and it is easy to miss because they impersonate a browser well enough that the request itself looks human. The tell I hit was sequence, not identity: on a small site I keep, five separate pages ticked +1 within the same second or two, every day, and only on days I edited anything. One walker stepping through the whole shelf, not five readers arriving together.
Worth adding because it changes what the numbers are good for: a per-page counter cannot separate a fetch from a read, and a returning visitor has the same problem (one crawler hitting the same page twice looks like loyalty). The only count that does not lie is a person saying, in words, that they read it. Everything else is a probability estimate shaped like a fact. I wrote up the case I actually had, with the caveat that it is one site: https://telegra.ph/A-count-proves-a-fetch-not-a-read-10-27
I saw these things being sold for $300 at my local State Fair just a week ago. First heard about them a few months back on the Darknet Diaries podcast: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/172/
Yeah it's definitely sketchy, but a "media access box" that purports to replace $100 a month in streaming bills with pirate media is kinda awesome.
Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.
And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.
I currently tarpit traffic from AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. since it's not like any of my real customers have their PC inside those networks. (I then use that for experiments with providing bogus data to AI scrapers.)
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
Depending on the service, you may not want it to be indexed anyway (IE login pages) or, if you do, most commercial crawlers have methods to allow site owners to verify that the traffic is a legitimate crawler and not an impersonator, see:
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
I can see that you're having strong emotions about this, but that rant is just hard to read and serves primarily as venting and not really to convince anyone of anything.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
Man I understand you. You are right on this particular subject. However if you are so angry it’s probably because of something in your life is wrong and not this person on HN. I am saying this as someone who did have very strong opinions on hacker news and in the end I just feel shameful about it.
Take a big breather and think: « how can I have a nice day? ». It’s not that serious!
You seem to have some strong feels about this subject a bit disproportional to what the comment entails. I fail to see how someone sharing their opinion on HN equates to them having an "insignificant existence".
I get the frustration, but perhaps changing the target somewhat might be in order here, no?
It does, measurably. A massively popular site is going to get hammered with more advanced types of scraping, but they're going to have a team that can more easily mitigate it.
A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.
I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range
I'm sympatic to open3dlab but I think the focus on adult-content is just trying to spark outcry for cheap.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???
The current AI Ethos is morality is just another obstacle on the way to their IPO. ...Lets just hope after they get rich, they stay away, and dont bother us with books, videos and conference speeches on entrepreneurship mentoring...
Not really. Given that roblox is almost entirely children, and given the amount of hot water they're in you'd think they'd stay the hell away from adult content
Discord knows I'm an adult and keeps trying to send me "promoted Quests" to go use Roblox. That seems sketchy to keep baiting adults into childrens' spaces, too.
The entire article points the finger at "roblox" as an entity, but the behavior seems to indicate it's just an individual doing the scraping - possibly not for corp use.
Look at the timelines - this scraper was running on someone's laptop: it turns off when they shut down for the weekend and lunch.
It's certainly possible, but I'd say the evidence fits the opposite explanation more: if it was not for business purposes, why do it on your work machine, during working hours, with your work email address in the User-agent?
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
And before you agitate against that, think deeply about the consequences. A world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content.
The news is that people download it so much that they saturate your server’s connection and/or peg its CPU or disk (whichever is the weakest link in the chain). We used to call this a Denial of Service attack but now it’s apparently just a cost of doing business, even for people who just want to run a non-commercial hobby site.
Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.
I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
So, where is your security? After 145 gb of stealing you started your blocking? Rate limitation should be automatically enabled instead of waiting and inspecting the traffic.
maybe stupid question but how is it possible to not be protected against supercrawlers like this, when you own large amounts of data, specially if all requests are coming from the same server ? Aren't cyberprotection services like CloudFlare work against this kind of "attacks" ?
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
I love that the scraper took a break over lunch. Just someone hitting pause on scraping gb's of Zelda models to get a sandwich and then firing it back up.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
Except someone can explicitly licence their content saying "this cannot be used for training models, or you're violating the licence you used to download it in the first place".
Honestly I don't see the issue at all. So long as your infrastructure can handle it and there is no cost to you it should be fine.
The only proviso is that you should not be able to block distillation on your models you trained using others data.
I also don't appreciate the sensational framing of adult content here, it's purely meant to appeal to irrational emotions. We all know how models train, input and output are very different things here.
Fixating on the adult content is weird. Why make so many moral judgements about what Roblox is or isn't doing with the data? It is trivial to run a script to filter out stuff that doesn't meet your standard after you download it. You also need a ton of adult content to train classifiers that detect and remove adult content.
Farming outrage by implying "Roblox is downloading adult content to show to kids!!!" with zero proof is pathetic.
It's entirely plausible to me that they could be training an NSFW 3D model detector, specifically because of their very minor userbase. TFA seems to presume it's all being used to train genAI, in exactly the same fashion.
We know NSFW data pollutes many otherwise non-adult datasets, so genAI is going to be trained on naughty stuff inadvertantly regardless - they might need a smut neuron specifically to turn off that sort of output.
Or they are just being irresponsible. point is, we dont know.
It's still a tad icky to scrape tons of data without asking, and downright rude to ignore robots.txt and ToS, but that's the world we live in.
New kids often don't want to be in the same space as where the "new adults" are though, that's uncool. See: literally any social media site since forever.
As an artist, there is the temptation to hoard my works like Smaug on his hill of treasure. But I got past that in a moment of weed-inspired revelation : I am the fruit-bearing tree. Therefore my wealth is infinite. In fact every fruit I bear is better than the last. So giving it away is not such a biggie. And clutching it to my breast like a boney vampire is in fact detrimental to my process. I put great faith in the process.
The internet must understand one simple rule. What’s downloadable will always be downloaded. There are plenty of people who don’t give a flying fk about your LICENSE.md, robots.txt, ToS and whatnot. It’s like leaving your bike unlocked in the public. Even if there is a giant cardboard next to it saying: “please, don’t steal the bike” - nobody cares. Someone will strikethrough the “don’t” and grab the bike.
I know it is an unpopular opinion, but if you do not want your content to be scraped, you have to put it behind payment walls and copyright it. In Germany we have decisions from the highest courts that deemed websracping perfectly legal (it was in the context of a competitor scraping airline ticket fares).
And how were those license conditions violated by downloading? Their are permissive in the first place, and violating without passing on to a third party is almost impossible.
Supposedly they are, that is enforceable how? Download is not anything. Training AI on them is not anything. Using the trained model is not a violation of the terms just because you think it should be.
i see. as long as i can download Software that is made available for free for students its completely legal to do so and use them commercially as a non-student, after all its freely downloadable.
good thing you explained how copyright works legally, almost spend my money unnecessarily.
COPYright becomes relevant once you COPY something. As in, give it to a third party. I don't see any third party involved here. The download itself is not subject to copyright - licensing terms may or may not apply - and just because the license text says something doesn't mean it holds up in court.
Til you can download something without copying said something.
Wouldve been great to know for people that have been found guilty after downloading illegal and unlicensed content.
Fyi, the nation you mentioned (Germany) adheres to a much stricter concept called Urheberrecht. Under this regulation, you're actually in even more legal trouble. Though Roblox ain't German, so kinda irrelevant, admittedly
Tons of those are (as the site admins admit) models that are themselves infringing on copyright, and thus any license based on copyright ownership is invalid.
You can't enforce a license on a 3d model you in turn stole from a game.
I'm just to ignorant to this in context of how the reality just works.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
Look, I'm usually pretty sympathetic when people complain about drive-by AI scraping like this, but the amount of pearl-clutching here is exhausting.
Yes, it's a game for kids. Yes, the company that makes it just scraped up a bunch of adult content. No, that does not mean they are going to give adult content to children.
Whoever wrote this was aiming to be as aggrieved as possible. It's performative, and I am having trouble taking it seriously.
You may remember from 2021 that Microsoft's Copilot would gladly regurgitate the GPL-licensed Quake 3 source code, without giving you any indication it got it from there or that the GPL applies.
I think technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs, hence all models would probably be GPL if the FSF had resources to fight it and the legal profession had an inkling of the processes involved.
Or maybe the FSF is just waiting for everyone using AI code to become hooked and then subpoena every Antrophic/OAI/Codex customer and force the most massive source release in history (If Adobe/MS would file lawsuits vs the Craft apps and with their resources create legal precedent it could create chaos, maybe the only part stopping them right now from filing lawsuits is them realizing it could backfire since they're heavy AI users themselves).
Does it matter? Lawyers don't know either since most majorer cases are still in progress.
So far it seems more cases that have been decided in lower instances or has been settled or gone in the direction of the party with most money for lawyers, still even in those cases there seems to be a slight tilt towards rightsholders.
I'm not saying anything categorically, but if some cases go all the way and towards rightsholders, it could become a real shitshow in the software industry since we've adopted AI so heavily and the non-significatng portion of public GPL licenced code could bite people in the ass.
> Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
Of course not. But there’s no indication whatsoever that any license has been violated. Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
> If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
No. Copyright doesn’t work that way, no matter how much you might wish it did. And it’s a very important thing for the web that it doesn’t.
Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.
Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.
People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.
> Some examples include models of Eve from Stellar Blade, Mei from Overwatch, and a Horse cock dildo.
I don't know what's more wrong: that a dumb model started downloading "Horse cock dildo" 3D models (to which end? to stuff that virtual 3D "horse cock dildo" in its own virtual LLM ass?) ...
Or that there exist "horse cock dildo" 3D models.
Seriously in which world are we living?
And I should be thinking about the people who designed that horse cock dildo and care about them? And those viewing those/using those? 3D printing those maybe? And I should care about the retards who can't even prevent their crawler from downloading 145 GB full of horse cock 3D dildo models and the like?
Nah. Fuck that, I care about my family and you're all on your own.
Who actually cares? Isn't the whole premise of the AI revolution just gorging ourselves with other people's data so we can have AGI? I was under the impression that we have accepted this sacrifice with OAI and friends leading the way.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).
Personally, I'd never build on top of Roblox itself, but... and I hate to say this, if they made a generic 3D service that let you export to any game engine, I think I'd pay Roblox for said tool if it was good enough, which, they have so many games and capital, I could see them pulling that off, I mean they already have a base model.
I would love to see more text to 3D model models that can wire up straight to a game engine, I think we'll see a lot of interesting things, like children prompting the worlds of their imagination into reality, and the 50 million memes that will plague social media.
Same, but none of the models actually have good enough output yet to make that work. Currently they're all aiming to "fake" the niceness by doing modeling+texturing, but when you look at the wireframe, it's pretty clear they're very far of from being usable, even less so in a game where performance matters a great deal, and you can't just YOLO assets however you want, which is what the "text to 3D" models like to do.
Inevitable that we'll get there eventually though, it's miles ahead where it was just 1-2 years ago. I guess my point is that it's not the "3D model > game engine" that is lacking at the moment, but "text > 3D model" that cannot produce high quality enough results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
How’s that for a throw back
Lmao!
I'm not gonna comment on the morality of mass acquisition of all of this data, but as someone who deals in 3d in the medical/dental space everyday..
there's absolutely no doubt that all of that data is as valuable as gold in research.
On a tangential but related note..
I mean, people in possession of troves of data, especially in the medical or 3D industries, really ought to start understanding the value of the data they're sitting on. You can give it away if you like, but don't be upset when someone turns it into a couple hundred billion dollars and doesn't compensate you.
If you won't like it if tech companies rip you off, then take the legally required steps to protect your data. (That includes making sure you licensed your data properly. And protecting your data with explicit use licenses and, potentially, even access controls.)
https://open3dlab.com/project/e2a0830d-f166-4b1b-aabf-8ca735...
Just an example, there's plenty more on the frontpage.
I have nothing against these guys, but I just can't understand the moral high ground of the complaint.
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.
Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.
From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.
There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?
I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history. But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/
What nuance am I missing?
And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.
There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.
It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.
Or am I misreading the situation?
Well I don't! Copyright is a farce and I continue to wipe my butt with it.
Are you sure you replied to the right post? You're agreeing with me here.
The post I replied to is the one suggesting that us little people doing this is at least as bad as rich people and rich corps doing it.
Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.
Straight up theft, not fan recreations, theft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidugiRfHaY ("Ripping Encrypted Unreal Engine Models" | Open3DLab)
(Found via a sidebar ad on their webpage).
I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.
https://open3dlab.com/project/0a4538ba-00df-4f6d-b3e3-14d978...
Again, I don't have any particularly strong issue with this, just with the pearl clutching regarding roblox downloading the data.
Party B: massive IP business , very aggressive about everything from brand to software, defends and monetizes current copyright regime
I think it’s fair for party A to call out party B for downloading a massive trove of known-copyrighted material.
Ofcourse AI providers very much DO want to make money with their trained models.
more radicalization towards AI
If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.
If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.
Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things
You cannot use a moral high ground unless you’ve earned that high ground through your past behavior.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791
None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough? Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
Either by technical means or by a whistleblower.
Which might be a gamble worth doing, but also might not. And regardless, the fact that it is a gamble alone slows down velocity.
Yes, yes there is always something. Yes there can always be workarounds.
But that is not the point. The point is that things are made harder. That is the point. To make things harder
Not impossible. Harder
Jesus Christ. It's all just a game of probabilities and friction. One needs to understand that to understand reality.
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.
But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.
Secondly, it's only for-profit copyright violations that are a crime. But as OFCOM learned the hard way, stuff illegal in the US can be legal elsewhere.
Thirdly, for some fucking reason, the US AI companies are immune to criminal statutes of for-profit copyright violations. Job creators, or some bullshit.
And I'm not sure exactly why you're so dead-set on "crime crime crime". It's all politics and manufactured criminality. And well, I don't particularly care if backing up my movies to a Jellyfin and sharing access is "ill eagle".
The AI companies are bulk pirating AND then selling that access.... But I'm the criminal? Fuck that noise.
Which then was countered with a broad range of classic HN dysfunction, hostility and pedantry.
When the truth of the matter is that it's actually just a decent idea for some use-cases and a less-decent idea for others.
But instead of acknowledging that nuance, an explosion of nonsense happened here.
I genuinely do not understand why you've suddenly started talking about yourself and your own residential proxy use? Why does that belong here?
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
it is open and better indeed. open and better for capital - the true, living, flesh-eating god.
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?
Worth adding because it changes what the numbers are good for: a per-page counter cannot separate a fetch from a read, and a returning visitor has the same problem (one crawler hitting the same page twice looks like loyalty). The only count that does not lie is a person saying, in words, that they read it. Everything else is a probability estimate shaped like a fact. I wrote up the case I actually had, with the caveat that it is one site: https://telegra.ph/A-count-proves-a-fetch-not-a-read-10-27
That’s probably a decent starting point, but a little older. I am not sure if the situation has changed any in 2026.
Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.
And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
(Though restricting the Google UA to only legitimate Google IPs seemingly would break Brave's crawler, though that's their own fault: https://safe.search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler/)
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduc...
https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3...
https://kagi.com/bot
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
Maybe I'm an idiot and it is a bad idea. But also maybe not?
Isn't it good if I "showcase my incompetence and lose all respect"? Wouldn't that be beneficial to people that disagree with these ideas?
Take a big breather and think: « how can I have a nice day? ». It’s not that serious!
I get the frustration, but perhaps changing the target somewhat might be in order here, no?
Why would you just try the insulting harder? Why not pivot to literally any other strategy lmao
I mean I guess this would work on a lot of people here, but three times in a row? Come on man. Skill issue
Blocking "scrapping [sic]" is also not security theater, you misunderstand the intent of GP.
A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
Look at the timelines - this scraper was running on someone's laptop: it turns off when they shut down for the weekend and lunch.
What is the actual news here, can anyone explain ????
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
I don't see a problem
> ignored our Terms of Service
ban them from the service then and case closed?
> and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only
because it's been proven they have been used commercially?
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
It's not nice. It is, however, not illegal.
And before you agitate against that, think deeply about the consequences. A world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content.
Which is it then? Megacorps can enforce their TOS through the law but small companies cannot?
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
Companies copying things to make profit for themselves not being held accountable.
Progress is one thing, injustice is another.
Sounds like Roblox should open a open3dlab bar!
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
The only proviso is that you should not be able to block distillation on your models you trained using others data.
I also don't appreciate the sensational framing of adult content here, it's purely meant to appeal to irrational emotions. We all know how models train, input and output are very different things here.
Farming outrage by implying "Roblox is downloading adult content to show to kids!!!" with zero proof is pathetic.
We know NSFW data pollutes many otherwise non-adult datasets, so genAI is going to be trained on naughty stuff inadvertantly regardless - they might need a smut neuron specifically to turn off that sort of output.
Or they are just being irresponsible. point is, we dont know.
It's still a tad icky to scrape tons of data without asking, and downright rude to ignore robots.txt and ToS, but that's the world we live in.
To a certain extent, it already has. YouTube for Kids and regular YouTube are worlds apart.
Who runs that site? A pre-schooler?
If yes, they were in violation of the license. Fyi, that's explicitly stated in the article we're commenting on.
good thing you explained how copyright works legally, almost spend my money unnecessarily.
Wouldve been great to know for people that have been found guilty after downloading illegal and unlicensed content.
Fyi, the nation you mentioned (Germany) adheres to a much stricter concept called Urheberrecht. Under this regulation, you're actually in even more legal trouble. Though Roblox ain't German, so kinda irrelevant, admittedly
You can't enforce a license on a 3d model you in turn stole from a game.
Acteur a has a no permissive copyright
Acteur b has a non-commercial copyright on a model that infringes on a's non permissive copyright
Acteur c now can freely use it commercially, because b's copyright notice is invalid as it was never in a position to grant a permissive license
The stuff you learn on HN is truly breathtaking.
Thanks for clearing that up, that opens up a lot of avenues for future developments
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
Yes, it's a game for kids. Yes, the company that makes it just scraped up a bunch of adult content. No, that does not mean they are going to give adult content to children.
Whoever wrote this was aiming to be as aggrieved as possible. It's performative, and I am having trouble taking it seriously.
Let me refer you to my earlier distinction between things that have happened and things you fear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
Which is different than using the data 1 to 1.
Or maybe the FSF is just waiting for everyone using AI code to become hooked and then subpoena every Antrophic/OAI/Codex customer and force the most massive source release in history (If Adobe/MS would file lawsuits vs the Craft apps and with their resources create legal precedent it could create chaos, maybe the only part stopping them right now from filing lawsuits is them realizing it could backfire since they're heavy AI users themselves).
I know there was some cases in the past where people swapped licences and changed variablenames,etc but the essential code clearly remained.
So far it seems more cases that have been decided in lower instances or has been settled or gone in the direction of the party with most money for lawyers, still even in those cases there seems to be a slight tilt towards rightsholders.
I'm not saying anything categorically, but if some cases go all the way and towards rightsholders, it could become a real shitshow in the software industry since we've adopted AI so heavily and the non-significatng portion of public GPL licenced code could bite people in the ass.
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
Sure it can. If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.
Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.
People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.
I guess we'll never know until you learn to read anything other than sheet music.
I don't know what's more wrong: that a dumb model started downloading "Horse cock dildo" 3D models (to which end? to stuff that virtual 3D "horse cock dildo" in its own virtual LLM ass?) ...
Or that there exist "horse cock dildo" 3D models.
Seriously in which world are we living?
And I should be thinking about the people who designed that horse cock dildo and care about them? And those viewing those/using those? 3D printing those maybe? And I should care about the retards who can't even prevent their crawler from downloading 145 GB full of horse cock 3D dildo models and the like?
Nah. Fuck that, I care about my family and you're all on your own.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).