28 comments

  • arshxyz 1 hour ago
    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
    • xnickb 39 minutes ago
      You're laughing, but they're probably going to use these models to train a model and allow players design their characters from a prompt.
      • whh 37 minutes ago
        Design models with a model trained on models. It’s quite straightforward
        • Buttons840 25 minutes ago
          All models are wrong, but some models are trained on models of models and still wrong.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

        • xnickb 34 minutes ago
          I'm sure one could recreate a look of some popular model. So the model trained on models then would generate a model of a model.
          • GaunterODimm 7 minutes ago
            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.
    • asciii 51 minutes ago
      > Some examples include models of Eve from Stellar Blade, Mei from Overwatch, and a Horse cock dildo.

      Lmao!

  • phn 1 hour ago
    How can you start an outcry like this, but host stuff like this, tagged with a permissive license:

    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.

    • amiga386 1 hour ago
      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.

      • Permit 1 minute ago
        > 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.

      • senordevnyc 8 minutes ago
        "It's OK if I do it, but not if someone more successful than me does it" is still blatant hypocrisy.
        • ImPostingOnHN 2 minutes ago
          "it's ok if a rich person or company does it, but not if someone less rich does it" is equally blatant hypocrisy that is worse for society.
    • reactordev 1 hour ago
      https://open3dlab.com/project/04d18c1b-c508-4017-be7b-766904...

      Straight up theft, not fan recreations, theft.

      • peri-cl 23 minutes ago
        Indeed. And they're not even pretending to keep an arms-length distance from their users' infringement; they're openly promoting it,

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidugiRfHaY ("Ripping Encrypted Unreal Engine Models" | Open3DLab)

        (Found via a sidebar ad on their webpage).

        • butlike 7 minutes ago
          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.
      • bdcravens 18 minutes ago
        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.

        • reactordev 9 minutes ago
          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.
    • Nekorosu 1 hour ago
      Oddly, this makes their argument even stronger. Why would Roblox download this?
      • pizzafeelsright 1 hour ago
        The game at the moment is capture as much content as possible.
      • bmacho 21 minutes ago
        .. why not? They need models, models are free, so they grab them. They have time to sort them out later.
      • smt88 25 minutes ago
        To train their LLM
      • inSumErgoCogito 25 minutes ago
        [dead]
    • pastage 1 hour ago
      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,
    • venussnatch 1 hour ago
      DMCA safe harbor? They're not responsible for user uploads until they are made aware of violations.
      • phn 1 hour ago
        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.

        • brookst 1 hour ago
          Party A: hosts largely copyrighted material, says they are opposed to copyright in its current form

          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.

        • gmerc 1 hour ago
          Then Roblox trains on it and voila…
    • sanex 22 minutes ago
      Funnily enough the YouTube video that came up when I viewed the page was an instructional video on ripping models from Unreal Engine games.
    • deadbabe 1 hour ago
      Moral high grounds don't mean much these days. They are weaponized as a way to get an advantage in an argument.
      • jmbwell 32 minutes ago
        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

    • Sopel 1 hour ago
      well it kinda worked? over on reddit r/gaming thinks the data has been stolen

      more radicalization towards AI

  • hypfer 2 hours ago
    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.

    • jeremyjh 2 hours ago
      There have been a number of articles on the frontpage of HN about the residential proxy traffic. It is happening. This was one of the most popular:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791

      • hypfer 2 hours ago
        I know, but it's an extra step, more expensive, and less legally solid.

        None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.

        • trollbridge 42 minutes ago
          ... less legally solid? What?
          • hypfer 37 minutes ago
            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.

            • itintheory 0 minutes ago
              Sure, that's why they sanitize the User-Ggent header when using these proxies. Good luck attributing the scraping to anyone at all.
            • nekusar 15 minutes ago
              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.

              • hypfer 12 minutes ago
                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.

    • cube00 2 hours ago
      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)
      • trollbridge 37 minutes ago
        Someone accessing a VPN that's in an Azure IP range is going to have a difficult time using half of the Internet.
      • hypfer 2 hours ago
        True but the question is if that matters.

        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 :(

        • gverrilla 1 hour ago
          > 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.

        • semiquaver 2 hours ago
          This is a website about starting businesses.

          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.

          • bigfishrunning 1 hour ago
            > This is a website about starting businesses.

            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.

          • hypfer 2 hours ago
            Hm I mean HN _also_ is that? But not exclusively.

            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.

          • anonreplier 1 hour ago
            Can use cloudflare turnstile or similar instead
          • wtch98 1 hour ago
            If you control the connecting device why not use MTLS?
            • semiquaver 35 minutes ago
              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?
      • jack_pp 48 minutes ago
        i can't access reddit through nordvpn
      • wtch98 1 hour ago
        All my business traffic comes from either our own AS, or from ZScaler's AS

        Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?

      • fahrvrgnugen 1 hour ago
        [dead]
    • gunalx 2 hours ago
      Allmost all the bottraffic I see is from random residential proxies though.
      • timpera 2 hours ago
        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.
        • sgerenser 2 hours ago
          Probably all people that fell for the “superbox” TV streamer scam.
          • Raed667 1 hour ago
            do you have a good link to learn about this ?
            • doubled112 1 hour ago
              https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/fbi-warning-iot-device...

              That’s probably a decent starting point, but a little older. I am not sure if the situation has changed any in 2026.

              • nekusar 37 minutes ago
                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.

    • trollbridge 44 minutes ago
      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.

    • bruce343434 1 hour ago
      Won't this harm SEO? What about agentic software suites where authorized users should be able to drop an app passkey into grokbot or such?
      • cj 18 minutes ago
        "Yes, but who cares" is the sentiment.
    • tommica 2 hours ago
      true! but how does one find all those ips?
      • Xylakant 2 hours ago
        That’s pretty easy - all major providers have public lists of IP ranges, usually as json files.
      • hypfer 2 hours ago
        Just ask RIPE
    • stopsayingsorry 2 hours ago
      >But I don't see that happening.

      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.

      • hypfer 2 hours ago
        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.

        • stopsayingsorry 2 hours ago
          [flagged]
          • hypfer 1 hour ago
            I mean I am very willing to just try and see what happens?

            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?

            • stopsayingsorry 1 hour ago
              [flagged]
              • cavacavacava 42 minutes ago
                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!

              • splatter9859 1 hour ago
                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?

              • hypfer 1 hour ago
                I have to ask: is this an LLM? :D

                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

          • lirolero 56 minutes ago
            [dead]
      • sampullman 2 hours ago
        It's hostile to you personally, but I wouldn't call it "user hostile".

        Blocking "scrapping [sic]" is also not security theater, you misunderstand the intent of GP.

        • stopsayingsorry 1 hour ago
          Anyone who thinks blocking datacenter ips helps with blocking scraping is a clown.
          • sampullman 1 hour ago
            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.

          • anonreplier 1 hour ago
            exactly, there are lots of other more effective ways to block the likes of you
            • stopsayingsorry 1 hour ago
              Let's hope you enjoy killing your real userbase with collateral damage, because that's the only thing you are going to accomplish.
      • wtch98 1 hour ago
        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
  • KolmogorovComp 2 hours ago
    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.

    • darthoctopus 2 hours ago
      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???
      • Betelbuddy 2 hours ago
        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...
    • criddell 1 hour ago
      They should change their name to openish3dlab.
    • ChrisRR 54 minutes ago
      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
      • trollbridge 29 minutes ago
        You'd think! But they don't. Roblox is also notorious for tolerating a ridiculous amount of grooming.
        • kotaKat 26 minutes ago
          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.
  • happyopossum 29 minutes ago
    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.

  • echoangle 2 hours ago
    Couldn't the adult file download just as well be used to train a model that rejects adult uploads to roblox? I don't see the outrage.
  • bijowo1676 2 hours ago
    if you put stuff available to download, dont be surprised that someone will download it

    What is the actual news here, can anyone explain ????

    • offbeatport 1 hour ago
      They didn't do it in the intended manner.

      > 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.

      • Sopel 49 minutes ago
        > did not respect our robots.txt

        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?

        • trollbridge 29 minutes ago
          I do. It's wrong to ignore a robots.txt.

          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.

    • tarsierscripter 1 hour ago
      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.
    • 233mhz 1 hour ago
      https://therecord.media/linkedin-wins-court-order-blocking-m...

      Which is it then? Megacorps can enforce their TOS through the law but small companies cannot?

    • well_ackshually 1 hour ago
      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.
    • numpad0 1 hour ago
      "Leopard ate MY face" ?
  • paxy 26 minutes ago
    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.

    • kortex 17 minutes ago
      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.

    • weird-eye-issue 20 minutes ago
      Because of the implication
  • j-pb 2 hours ago
    3$ in outbound traffic on a public service, how is this news?
    • dofm 2 hours ago
      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)

      • whizzter 1 hour ago
        Aaron Swartz pulled down by the legal system for trying to get things accessible for people instead of being blocked by profit requirements.

        Companies copying things to make profit for themselves not being held accountable.

        Progress is one thing, injustice is another.

  • paxy 33 minutes ago
    Scraping is legal, last I checked. If you don't want people downloading your content then don't host it.
  • GL26 2 hours ago
    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" ?
    • hmokiguess 1 hour ago
      "supercrawlers like this"

      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

    • Steve16384 2 hours ago
      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.
  • bsenftner 2 hours ago
    If that data is at all important, why is is downloadable?
    • jalict 2 hours ago
      This is quite simple put in the article.

      > 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.

      • bsenftner 2 hours ago
        A robots.txt file is not anything, not enforceable, it's politeness. Of course it was ignored.
      • fg137 1 hour ago
        That fight was already lost back in 2024.
      • ForHackernews 1 hour ago
        Sue them. They'd sue you for ignoring their ToS.
    • whizzter 1 hour ago
      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.

      • bunderbunder 1 hour ago
        If courts say that training models is fair use then copyright and license terms are moot.
        • phoghed 1 hour ago
          It’s not fully played out in the courts yet, but so far doesn’t look like it’s going to be enforced how you want it to be.
        • trollbridge 27 minutes ago
          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".
  • germandiago 26 minutes ago
    The great theft.
  • swiftcoder 2 hours ago
    I wonder at what point the Roblox kids all reach 18 years old, and Roblox can pivot them all to a separate adult version thereof...
    • phoghed 1 hour ago
      Never, it gets new players constantly. This is like saying I wonder when YouTube is going to turn into Pornhub
    • paxy 31 minutes ago
      You know there are new kids being made right..
      • embedding-shape 19 minutes ago
        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.
    • lifeisloving 51 minutes ago
      Robloxs original player base is their 20s now and still play.
  • RicardoRose 14 minutes ago
    It is so cool
  • littlecranky67 2 hours ago
    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).
    • ffsm8 1 hour ago
      They ignored the licenses, so kinda moot point you're making.
      • ang_cire 22 minutes ago
        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.

      • littlecranky67 1 hour ago
        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.
        • ffsm8 1 hour ago
          Were they used in a commercial context when a commercial entity downloaded it?

          If yes, they were in violation of the license. Fyi, that's explicitly stated in the article we're commenting on.

          • paxy 30 minutes ago
            How do you know what context it was used in?
          • littlecranky67 1 hour ago
            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.
            • ffsm8 1 hour ago
              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.

              • phoghed 1 hour ago
                Yes, as of now, you can do exactly what you assume that Roblox did. How is this still surprising to people?
      • echoangle 1 hour ago
        If it’s fair use, the license doesn’t matter.
  • andreygrehov 1 hour ago
    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 bicycle unlocked in public. Even if there is a giant cardboard next to it saying: “please, don’t steal” - nobody cares.
  • philipwhiuk 1 hour ago
    I assume they need the adult content in order to detect adult content generated by their users.
  • speedgoose 2 hours ago
    145GB isn’t much. It fits in RAM in some computers.
    • superultra 1 hour ago
      145gb of ram? Check out Mr. Moneybags over here!
  • origini 1 hour ago
    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.

  • semiquaver 2 hours ago
    So what? You made your content available and someone downloaded it. Why is this even notable?
    • not-kinsale-joe 1 hour ago
      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?
      • semiquaver 34 minutes ago
        Did someone do that in this case? I don’t see any indication let alone evidence that happened. And I don’t think it’s likely that it will.

        Let me refer you to my earlier distinction between things that have happened and things you fear.

      • Artoooooor 1 hour ago
        Oh, it would be so nice to force the Great Thieves like "open"AI to release their weights on GPL license...
      • wtch98 1 hour ago
        > 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

      • origini 1 hour ago
        Right now, its legal to use this data to train a model.

        Which is different than using the data 1 to 1.

        • whizzter 1 hour ago
          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).

          • semiquaver 4 minutes ago
            Not a lawyer, are you?
          • origini 1 hour ago
            But as far as i know GPL does not prevent you from using it for training?
    • jalict 2 hours ago
      Would you also say that general licensing is irrelevant for everyone?
      • semiquaver 2 hours ago
        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.

        • philipwhiuk 1 hour ago
          > Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.

          Sure it can. If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.

          • semiquaver 2 minutes ago

              > 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.

            Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.

        • well_ackshually 1 hour ago
          If only you could read the article and see that the vast majority of the assets are licensed under a non-commercial clause.

          I guess we'll never know until you learn to read anything other than sheet music.

  • TacticalCoder 28 minutes ago
    > 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.

  • peridotintellig 2 hours ago
    I'm not even impressed..
  • xvilo 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • NewsaHackO 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • georgestones 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • caaqil 2 hours ago
    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.
    • bulbar 2 hours ago
      People really still buy into that framing? I think it's pretty clear that it's generally just about money as it has always been.
      • MSFT_Edging 1 hour ago
        Tech is full of rubes that eat up the lies.

        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).

    • Steve16384 2 hours ago
      Who's "we"?
    • Artoooooor 1 hour ago
      If the authors of the data are paid...ok. and not just the biggest players - every single one. But they are not.
      • phoghed 1 hour ago
        Sam, pay this guy for his shitposts please
    • tempfile 2 hours ago
      "we" in this sentence is really a handful of encloistered silicon valley weirdos. Most people do not like it and have no real say in the matter.
  • lifeisloving 52 minutes ago
    Everyone should be hosting a poison fountain and pressing thumbs down on models when they provide really good answers.