Recently, the social media platform Bluesky faced a significant data scraping incident. A machine learning librarian, Daniel van Strien, scraped over one million public user posts from Bluesky's API and uploaded this data to the AI company Hugging Face. The dataset includes users' Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and a range of features to search for specific user content.

Recently, the Southern District Court of New York dismissed the copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI filed by Raw Story Media, Inc. and AlterNet Media, Inc., stating that the case lacked standing. This ruling marks an important victory for OpenAI in the legal disputes between AI and copyright, providing a reference for handling similar cases in the future. Raw Story and AlterNet are two online news outlets primarily focused on leftist perspectives.

In the era of driven artificial intelligence, the demand for high-quality data by large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and BERT is increasing. However, manually sorting this data from the web is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive but also often difficult to scale. This poses significant challenges for developers, especially when large amounts of data are required. Traditional web crawlers and data scraping tools have limited capabilities in extracting structured data; although they can collect webpage data, they often cannot format it in a style suitable for LLM processing.

Recently, Wired magazine reported that Apple's content-scraping bot, Applebot, has faced collective resistance from multiple major media outlets, including well-known platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, The New York Times, and The Financial Times, which have chosen to block Applebot and deny it access to their website content. This phenomenon reflects the complex situation in the field of AI content scraping and the media industry's complicated attitude towards AI technology. Research shows that approximately 6% to 7% of websites have blocked Applebot, while up to

The Claude team has caused a major uproar due to their large-scale, unauthorized data scraping activities. Their crawler accessed the iFixit servers one million times within 24 hours, scraping a significant amount of website content, leading to severe resource strain on the servers, which triggered strong dissatisfaction from both the affected company and the public. iFixit explicitly prohibits data scraping on their website, yet the Claude team's actions disregarded these rules, resulting in months of illegal access to the site. This incident not only disrupted iFixit's normal operations but also impacted other entities reliant on website content.

European data protection regulators are investigating Elon Musk's X platform for allegedly using user data for its AI startup xAI without explicit consent. Users have reported that their posts and interactions with the Grok chatbot were used for AI training. The Irish Data Protection Commission has sent inquiries to X regarding user transparency and may investigate potential GDPR violations, raising concerns about possible fines or penalties. X h....

Anthropic's ClaudeBot web crawler frequently accessed the iFixit website within 24 hours, allegedly violating terms of use by unauthorized content usage and consuming development resources. iFixit has added a crawl-delay extension in robots.txt to limit crawler access. This incident also affected other websites, such as Read the Docs and Freelancer.com. AI companies like OpenAI refuse crawler access through robots.txt.

Recently, Reddit implemented restrictions to prevent major search engines and AI bots from accessing its latest content for free unless they are willing to pay. This policy has made Google the only mainstream search engine able to show the latest results through 'site:reddit.com'. Reddit's move aims to protect its data and seeks to generate new revenue sources through data monetization, in an effort to attract more investors. This action has garnered attention, especially from users accustomed to search engines like Bing.

Reddit is taking action to prevent AI companies from scraping its content or at least requiring them to pay. Earlier this week, Reddit announced that it is changing its robots exclusion protocol, also known as its robots.txt file. This seemingly dull edit is part of a larger negotiation/battle among content owners eager for AI companies to train their language models.

Firecrawl, a powerful web scraping tool developed by the Mendable AI team, is designed to address the complex challenges involved in acquiring data from the internet. While web scraping is very useful, it often requires overcoming various hurdles such as proxies, caching, rate limits, and content generated using JavaScript. Firecrawl is a vital tool for data scientists as it directly tackles these issues.

Google strongly refutes the AI copyright lawsuit, insisting that 'using public information for learning is not theft'. The lawsuit involves AI infringing on privacy and property rights, and Google claims the allegations are unfounded. U.S. law supports the use of public information for new purposes, and Google firmly believes in its legality.