I feel like I'm missing something. What the article claims they're doing is:
1. Misrepresenting what rights they have, and selling access to those rights.
2. Stealth-crawling the web, hiding from the webmasters just how much Brave is crawling their site, and making it impossible to block just their crawler.
How is either of these the right thing? I mean, for somebody besides Brave. What "attempt" are they making that other companies aren't?
Excerpt From The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Shoshana Zuboff
The second doesn't seem like a problem to me as long as they respect robots.txt
The Wikipedia example is glaring. They’re scraping content, stripping attribution and reselling it with a right to lock it down in a way that is not allowed by the original license.
Brave is laundering copyleft content while lying to their customers by selling a license they can’t give. If you’d like, you can sidestep the morality of copyright entirely and focus on the plagiarism and fraud.
> without any worry for copyright infringement because Brave acts as a middleman.
This isn’t how law works. Unless Brave is explicitly indemnifying all their customers (which their lawyers would have to be insane to let them do), any trouble you could get in, is going to be 100% your problem. Pointing the finger at Brave could theoretically get them in trouble too, but would in no way let you off the hook.
But your original claim wasn't just "Brave are technically not doing anything illegal" or "they're no worse than the others". It was praising them for being better than the others, that they're the only ones trying to do the right thing. And for these example it's just not true, they're outright worse than the industry standard.
So, to repeat, what makes you think that "Brave is trying to do the right thing while other companies aren't even attempting"?
And you don't seem to have read the article either, because clearly it was explained that they don't respect robots.txt because they have no user-agent.
Doesn’t matter when the content is reproduced verbatim, as Brave is doing. If I memorise your content and then repeat it as my own, I’m not somehow off the hook for copyright violation and plagiarism.
(The fact that they include original URL does not change much, given that they explicitly market it as "Data for AI" and those systems never have attribution)
Wait. Brave browser sends back to Brave Search engine about your browsing? Other search engines usage, but also crawl pages on your computer to help build their search index?
Ref: https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/mod...
It's also a for-profit company and you're not the customer, as you're not paying them money.
I'd be way more worried how they're using the data they're collecting on you vs Google or MS
If you don’t trust that they’re doing what they say they are, then the document doesn’t mean anything. Although that would also mean the quote is kind of meaningless…
> 1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
> 2) The nature of the copyrighted work
> 3) The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
> 4) The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
[emphasis from TFA]
HN always talks about derivative work and transformativeness, but never about these. The fourth one especially seems clear in its implications for models.
Regardless, it makes it seem much less clear cut than people here often say.
Mullvad
Brave
Opera
Vivaldi
Microsoft
Heck zoho is in on a browser now
What net gain does each of these companies provide over skinning chromium that isn't in Firefox?
Last time I asked brave fanboys why they don't redskin Firefox and the response was "Firefox is pita to build" all the while we have projects like palemoon and waterfox that are hobby projects. If they can work with firefox, so could someone else but no
Why? They don't even have access to my emails and texts like those other companies do. I also don't see the names of their top executives and founders showing up in articles about connections to Jeffrey Epstein every few months.
i would use it daily if the UI/UX was better, or more similar to firefox
Second, “use” here could mean one of two things: training or inference. It’s publishing the results of inference that can lead to actual effects on the market, not the training.
At the end of the day, someone has to prove tangible harm.
The answer is no, because you reading the article didn’t dramatically degrade its market value.
An AI ingesting all content on the internet and then being ultra-effective at frontrunning that content for a large number of future readers does degrade its market value (and subsumes it into the model’s value).
A ML model is clearly a derivative work of its input.
Here's what I think would be fair:
Anyone who holds copyright in something used as part of a training corpus is owed a proportional share of the cash flow resulting from use of the resulting models. (Cash flow, not profits, because it's too easy to use accounting tricks to make profits disappear).
In the case of intermediaries (e.g., social media like reddit & twitter) those intermediaries could take a cut before passing it on to the original authors.
Obviously hellishly difficult to administer so it's unlikely to happen but I don't see a better answer.
I did. When we folded less than two years later, one of the CTOs biggest stated regrets was that he went with Firefox instead of Chromium. The extension story in Firefox was easily 10x harder. Interfacing with the OS as well. Getting dbus services to work was a fool's errand.
If you look at the core argument in favour of fair use, it's that "LLMs do not copy the training data", yet this is obviously false.
For Github copilot and ChatGPT examples of it reciting large sections of training data are well known. Plenty can be found on HN. It doesn't generate a new valid windows serial key on the fly, it's memorized them.
If one wants to be cynical, it's not hard to see OpenAI/etc patching in filters to remove copyrighted content from the output precisely because it's legally catastrophic for their "fair use" claim to have the model spit out copyrighted content. As this is both copyright infringement by itself, and evidence that no matter how the internals of these models work, they store some of the training data anyway.
Thunderbird also works.
I happen to own a brwoser extension and have both chromium and Firefox extensions. I kinda know myself.
> They don't mention their crawler anywhere in their docs, either. So, if you wanted to block Brave from crawling and indexing and ultimately selling your content to third parties, your only option for the time being would be to block all crawlers, which is how Brave would be able to "respect robots.txt".
Legal judgments generally focus on actual impacts rather than quirks that might exist in hypothetical universes.
Facebook recently got told by the CJEU that, no, they can't use people's posts to target advertisements. Even if those ads are what's paying for the platform. That you can't claim such processing as "part of the contract" unless it is absolutely necessary in the same way the post office needs an address to send a parcel.
If Facebook can't even do that, there is no way LLMs will be allowed. (And remember. The GDPR does not care if your system doesn't distribute personal data. Any kind of processing at all falls under the GDPR's requirements)
OpenAI is already being chased by the EU's privacy agencies. Right now they're in the process of asking pointed questions, things will heat up after that.
That's genius!
Atricle 3 and 4 of the EU 'Copyright in the Digital Single Market' give data miners quite extensive rights.
Move operation to the EU, train a foundational model, than train a constitutional model based on that.
As much as I hate the upcoming AI regulation, the CDSM is solid.
https://academic.oup.com/grurint/article/71/8/685/6650009 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj
Update: Fixed wrong link
"Brave doesn’t follow the sneaky practices of other big tech search engines. The Web Discovery Project is opt-in, and the data collected under the Web Discovery Project has specific protections to ensure anonymity." per https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
If your pool of people that can learn about topic X is restricted the outputs or their labor are more expensive. Now lift a continent of billions of people out of poverty, get them access to schooling, safety etc and see the market forces do the rest.
Now equate ChatGPT et al with said billion people. Just that it runs on electricity. If quality is good enough of course. Which is hard to decide right now because of hype.
The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on a software case like this, as far as I know. But given the recent 7-2 decision against Andy Warhol’s estate for his copying of photographs of Prince, this doesn’t seem like a Court that’s ready to say copying terabytes of unlicensed material for a commercial purpose is OK.
I’m going to guess this ends with Congress setting up some kind of clearinghouse for copyrighted training material: You opt in to be included, you get fees from OpenAI when they use what you added. This isn’t unprecedented: Congress set up special rules and processes for things like music recordings repeatedly over the years.
https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
They block the in-page ads and instead provide their own ads through popup notifications.
So they are replacing advertisements on websites.
GNU/Hurd is also a very interesting alternative OS, the design is a lot more elegant than GNU/Linux, it's still under active development and it has a surprising number of active users.
It's still a very bad idea to build the foundation of your tech stack on it.
There are some things that would make for good faith displays by the players in the space. For example, Microsoft has been investing a lot and yet their code offering is not trained on their internal code base. Same for Google. Start by doing that and I'll entertain the argument that your tools are fair use or data mining.
By your logic, opera was having their own engine till 2013. So what?
How it works now is that when Brave replaces an ad, they put the new ad in a popup, not in-page
Regarding the copyright of returned material here is a good discussion:
https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/05/09/generative-...
And if it's your cup of tea, they let you straight up pay money for the search engine.
An important direction would be to train copyright attribution models, and diff-models to detect when a work is infringing on another, by direct comparison. They would be useful to filter both the training set and the model outputs.
- The ad blocker works separately from their own ad service.
- Their own ads are opt-in.
- People receive 70% of the revenue from the ads they see.
- The ads from Brave do not track you and whatever personalisation happens in-device, no data is mined.
So, no. They are not "replacing" anything. They are not stealing anyone's revenue (and no matter how much Linus from LTT argues, he is not entitled to any revenue just because I watched any of his videos) and Brave's own ads are from deals that they closed themselves and a essentially fraud-proof compared with whatever payouts are given by largest ad networks.
In other words, they are just offering something that happens to be infinitely more user-focused than the status quo. Every attempt at framing this as unethical came from an uninformed or biased source.
That’s the author’s entire gripe. Brave reproduced a Wikipedia entry without attribution and then slapped a copyright on it to boot.
[0] https://blogs.opera.com/africa/2022/05/free-data-with-opera-...
[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/21/opera-predatory-loa...
The one type of in-page modification they used to do is that they would add a "tip" button to the content creator of some social networks like Twitter or reddit. That had nothing to do with "replacing ads" though.
> replaces an ad, they put the new ad in a popup
Incorrect. There is no 1:1 replacement. You as the user can define how often you want to receive notifications, and even then the notifications only come when you are switching context between any action. It won't interrupt you while you are watching a video, working on google doc spreadsheet or reading though HN.
That's not how it works. If you turn on Brave ads, they show up every once in a while, completely independently of webpage ads. And they work whether your ad blocker is on or off.
click on it, your horizon might be broadened by the added knowledge.
Do you mean this in a copying sense or a mathematical sense?
What if it's only storing 1 byte per input document?
The problem is that filtering the training set is naively O(n^2) and n is already extremely large for DALL-E. For LLMs, it's comically huge, plus now you have to do substring search. I've yet to hear OpenAI talk about training set deduplication in the context of LLMs.
As for the legal basis... nobody's ruled on AI training sets in the US. Even the Google Books case that I've heard cited in the past (even by myself) really only talks about searching a large corpus of text. If OpenAI's GPT models were really just a powerful search engine and not intelligent at all, they'd actually be more legally protected.
My money's still on "training is fair use", but that actually doesn't help OpenAI all that much either, because fair use is not transitive. Right now, such a ruling would mean that using AI art is Russian roulette: if your model regurgitates, the outputs are still infringing, even if the model is fair use. Novel outputs aren't entirely safe, though. A judge willing to commit the Butlerian Jihad[0] might even say that regurgitation does not matter and that all AI outputs are derivative works of the entire training set[1].
This logic would also apply in the EU. Last I checked the TDM exception only said training is legal, not that you could sell the outputs. They don't really respect jurisprudence the way the Anglosphere obsesses over "precedent", so copyright exceptions are almost always decided by legislatures and not judges over there, and the likelihood of a judge saying that all outputs are derivative works of the training set regardless of regurgitation is higher.
[0] In the sci-fi novel Dune, the Butlerian Jihad is a galaxy-wide purge of all computer technology for reasons that are surprisingly pertinent to the AI art debate.
Yes, this is also why /r/Dune banned AI art. No, I have not read Dune.
[1] If the opinion was worded poorly this would mean that even human artists taking inspiration to produce legally distinct works would be violating copyright. The idea-expression divide would be entirely overthrown in favor of a dictatorship of the creative proletariat.
[2] "Music and Film Industry Association of America" - an abbreviation coined for an April Fools joke article about the MPAA and RIAA merging together.
lalaland1125 is making claims about what they actually did, and those claims are not correct.
I used to recommend Firefox, but Mozilla has totally jumped the shark (privacy violations [multiple], wastes too much money, blocks APIs that are useful with no real security risks while approving APIs with little use that do have security risks, etc, very user hostile).
Chromium is obviously not trustworthy at this point, let alone Chrome. So that leaves like, Safari and Opera?
Brendan Eich is the CEO of Brave, and I trust him. Mozilla was good until he was ousted for political reasons.
“Write a review of this short story: …” – probably fine.
“Rewrite this short story to have a happier ending: …” – probably not.
How about if you read a news article to write a competing one rewording and possibly citing it (one of the most common practices in news)?
Brave is like 99% of Chromium + uBlock…
That being said, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to differentiate these cases. Google was indexing copyrighted works and providing access to limited extracts. They weren’t transforming them into new works and then selling access to those new works over APIs.
A judge can’t “commit” the butlierian jihad. A jihad is a mass event caused by some fraction of the population believing in some cause.
Which kinda gets to a point that seems to be missed. Copyright law is not “intrinsic” - nobody thinks that copyright is a natural law - it is just a pragmatic implementation which balances various public and private goods. If the world changes such that the law no longer does a good job of balancing the various goods, then either the law will get changed or people will ignore the law.
The most obvious parallel to me is YouTube. There are a ton of people ingesting books, then transforming that information into a roughly paraphrased video for people to watch for free (ish). That devalues the books they read and paraphrased, because other people don't need to read them.
Spark Notes devalue actual books in a way, because a lot of high schoolers read those instead of buying the actual book.
Search engines have also supplanted books in large part, because I don't need a whole book to answer a specific question. I don't know anyone that owns an encyclopedia anymore.
This is the next iteration of these processes. Non-novel information's market value has been degrading for decades now. A series of questions that would have cost thousands of dollars in books to answer in the 70's/80's is now free, with or without AI.
Chromium is a great browser, unfortunately the official branch has been poisoned by Google.
And AI training is extremely legible. This is not like a bunch of people downloading stuff off BitTorrent. All of the large foundation models we use were trained by a large corporation with a source of venture capital funding which could be easily shut off by a sufficiently motivated government. Weights-available and liberally licensed models exist, but most improvements on them are fine-tuning. Anonymous individuals can fine-tune an LLM or art generator with a small amount of data and compute, but they cannot make meaningful improvements on the state of the art.
So our sufficiently motivated copyright judge could at least effectively freeze AI art in time until Big Tech and the MAFIAA agree on how to properly split the proceeds from screwing over individual artists.
"Butlerian Jihad" is a term from a book, so you don't need to take "jihad" literally. However, I will point out that there is a significant fraction of the population that does want to see AI permanently banned from creative endeavors. The loss of ownership over their work from having it be in the training set is a factor, but their main argument is that they specifically want to keep their current jobs as they are. They do not want to be replaced with AI, nor do they want to replace their existing drawing work with SEO keyword stuffed text-to-image prompts.
For that same exact reason, it’s totally reasonable they’re attracting unique amounts of negative attention too.
You can’t have it both ways: yes LLMs are going to change information retrieval the way nothing else has before, but no it’s actually just like all the other things in terms of their impact on incentive structures.
FWIW I don’t really know where I land on this issue. I just find it totally incoherent to believe in the bull case of “this will transform everything” while also portraying it all as par for the course when discussing potential negatives.
Just because Spark Notes didn’t obviously manage to kill valuable parts of our information ecosystem and economy does not mean that Spark Notes x 10,000,000 will not.
There are standard ways to do it that are O(n), FYI.
Cliqz entire history was based on this kind of thing, milking off other search engines by just deducting their ranking methods, it's parasitic. There's no cleverness about it.
Editing to add that I don't mean to imply ill will on your part, but that I think being affiliated with Brave might have you taking this type of practice a little more lightly than it probably should be taken.
Imagine OpenAI had invented a software program that turned any written text into an animated cartoon enacting the text. That would obviously be creating a derivative work and outside fair use bounds. That they mix a bunch of works (copyrighted and otherwise) into a piece of software doesn’t allow them to escape that basic analysis.
Google showed a “clip” of the original work, no different in scope than Siskel & Ebert showing a clip of a film as they reviewed it. The uses are not comparable.
https://brave.com/firewall-vpn/ https://account.brave.com/?intent=checkout&product=search https://brave.com/search/api/
Google owns 95% of the market in most Western markets. There's no "blatantly false" about that.
They scrape search engine results and present them as their own.
Do 10,000 searches on Google and Brave and you'll see how similar they are. It's as simple as that, scraping by sleight of hand.
Why can't they be a normal search engine - because they need to scrape others. Simples.
There are a lot of pretty complex prompts, where if you asked a group of reasonably skilled programmers to implement, they'd produce code that was "reformatted and changed variable names" but otherwise identical. Many of us learned from the same foundational materials, and there are only a handful of non-pathological ways to implement a linked list of integers, for example.
With code it may be more obvious, in that you can't as easily obfuscate things with synonyms and sentence structure changes. Even with prose, there is going to be a tendency to use "conventional" language choices, driving you back towards a familiar-looking mean.
So say a US judge did impose severe restrictions on LLMs through US copyright law. The giant companies that are using LLMs will just move to another country. And just like tax law, others will be happy to have them. Would the US start blocking inbound internet traffic from countries that don’t have the same interpretation of copyright? That seems very unlikely.
The point is that the only way LLMs get the butlerian jihad treatment is if the people rise up against them. Right now, that is nowhere close to happening.
Brave is perfectly OK with having oopsies too
That said, stuff like Jedi Blue and Project Bernanke suggest Brave could just disclose they support competitive markets.
How do you even automate paraphrasing without training it on lots of original work? It's infringement all the way down.
Mullvad, is the Tor Browser with the Mullvad VPN included, and released 2023. However, the Tor Browser, which it effectively is, is from 2002.
Brave, the one in this article, is from 2019.
Opera is from 1994.
Vivaldi is from 2015, and is developed by Opera's previous dev-team after a bad sale to a Chinese company.
Microsoft's first browser, Internet Explorer, is from 1995.
I can not comment about Zoho's browser, as i know little about it.