For context: Cara is an artists social platform that gained traction after Instagram made you agree to let them use your pictures for whatever purpose (train AI most likely). The platform has a firm stance against the use of generative AI and even has Glaze built in (a tool to poison pictures for when they’re fed to AI).
Only recently I saw a post here on Lemmy about someone scraping all of Cara and posting about it (https://lemmy.world/post/50643500). Apparently it’s been already three times.
These people really have no shame. Fuck them.
Jingna Zhang is now collecting funds to support Cara in taking legal action. Here is the official post:
https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-needs-your-help
Cara needs your help. We have been scraped a third time. This is now a targeted attack meant to cause artists pain.
Scrapers know we’re a volunteer project with no financial means to respond. So they say it’s legal, believing themselves untouchable.
We’re taking action.
I believe artists who want to share their work with the world should get to do so without people violating their consent. We won’t be forced into making Cara members-only because some people think “consent isn’t always valid”. You don’t blame victims after harming them.
These scrapers feel safe because they know we’re small team of volunteers, that we have no way of affording help.
So I’m asking our community, will you come together? Please help us take legal action.
Other platforms may not care because artists are easy targets to bully. No one really stands with us.
But I care because it is my home, our home. I won’t let them trample over the hearts of everyone. Our team may be small, but we want to defend Cara.
I have a lot on my plate and my body is falling apart from all I’ve taken on these past years. But I always think, when we’re alive, we should do what’s right.
People who think they can harm others because it’s “legal” shouldn’t get away with it. I refuse to give up.
I don’t want this to become encouragement for open season on artists just because we seem powerless.
So I want to take legal action and find out just what we can or cannot do. I want to know what I need to do next, to make this twisted world change. To hold people accountable.
If you can, please consider donating whether it’s $1, $10, or $50 to our legal fund. This will help us seek counsel for legal options for both Cara and its artists, and in carrying out necessary legal actions.
Please help us stop scrapers from targeting artists.
https://gofundme.com/f/help-cara-legal-fund
Jingna Zhang
Founder, Cara
Just donated 50 euro- give 'em heck boys. o7
Wow. Unbelievable. I’m an artist who has signed up for Cara, but I haven’t really used it yet. I certainly will now. I should quit Instagram while I’m ahead.
And fuck AI scrapers.
“this company should have legal ownership over my work because they said I could trust them”
3 years down the line… I’m going to say it right now, shut the actual fuck up you were warned by common sense.
Of course the MAGA guy also has batshit things to say in other areas they know nothing about. Thanks for the laugh.
Get a grip you weak nonse. I don’t participate in your echo chamber
Well that was unhinged
:/ take responsibility for your actions stop bitching before ever signing up to be taken advantage of by the dumb bitch agency
Huh???
Best of luck to Cara.
It seems some scraper bros think it’s all a game or a challenge. This is one of the few things appropriate for harsh criminal sentences so they get the message. If that’s jurisdictionally impossible or whatever, then vigilante justice is the only recourse.
OK, I get that this is exactly the kind of shitty behaviour (on the part of the AI bros) that makes people feel like “Something has to be done”, but I think everyone here needs to Google “Aaron Swartz” first.
The moment we decide that “scraping” is a crime, we’re further enabling the kind of corporate hording of access to our cultural commons that is already becoming far too widespread.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
We literally already live in the world you’re describing. Aaron Swartz already killed himself because of the blowback from his scraping. OpenAI/Anthropic/Facefuck/Google/whateverthefuckothercompany are all thriving with theirs, getting corpo and government contracts left and right.
This battle is already lost.
There is a difference on open information, which was what Aaron wanted, and basically having your means of living scrapped and reused with no payment whatsoever. I’m all about a free and open internet, but free internet does not mean you can’t make a fair living out of it
And if we want to change that, we can’t keep establishing precedents that reinforce the status quo.
I don’t think that approving the leeching of art and culture into a machine so it can regurgitate some calculated, soulless middle-ground sum of all its parts is the way to go with that. I’m unequivocally behind Jingna Zhang and anyone else who wishes to bring the hammer down and crush whoever or whatever feeds this machine.
Letting some scum scrape Cara isn’t going to magically translate into medicines no longer being copyrightable and available to all who needs it.
The problem here is that people keep trying to tackle these issues with the wrong tools. For example, demands to strengthen copyright. In the long run, that’s not actually a good thing. As much as we dislike what these companies are doing, once we start saying things like “Reading a book into a computer is stealing it” we’re basically giving Amazon a big wet sloppy kiss. We need to approach this fight carefully and with an eye to unintended consequences. Lashing out wildly is going to create more problems than it solves.
but not the war
The entire notion that a “battle” over laws and societal norms can ever be won or lost is fundamentally ludicrous.
Republicans “lost” their fight against abortion with Roe V Wade, right? But because everyone else decided the battle was won and stopped fighting, now that right is collapsing.
It’s as stupid to think these battles can be lost as it is to think they can be won. You always have to keep fighting. Always.
I don’t buy it. Launching civil litigation because someone maliciously hacked your website to steal the material within isn’t a wholesale declaration that scraping is “illegal.”
I think there is an argument to be made that there IS illegality here, but protecting one’s own assets from scraping done in bath faith by someone whose intent was specifically and unequivocally to cause harm is hardly setting new precedent.
I would be interested in seeing a source on Cara being “hacked.” Not saying it didn’t happen, just that I’ve not seen any information to that effect so far.
And I do want you to keep in mind that the US Government arrested Aaron Swartz for hacking even though all he did was batch download publicly listed files. So we need to be pretty damn cautious about how people deploy that word.
I hope both sides of your pillow are hot at night.
What a weird thing to say to someone asking for sources. I was under the impression that we were the people who believe that facts matter.
You’re more than welcome to just prove me wrong by providing a source, BTW. Like I said, I’m not accusing anyone of being a liar here. I just want to know the facts.
It’s not sustainable either way; this system. The real question is how: how many people are you ready to fuck over on the way down?
deleted by creator
They dont get it both ways. Its already illegal, hold them to the same standards we were.
Also Aaron was a creep.
I genuinely do not care if Aaron Swartz was a mass murderer, it would not justify what the government did to him.
The moment you decide that people don’t get rights just because they’re a bad person, you’re a fascist.
I knew Aaron. He had his dorky moments but glass houses etc.
I hope they win, fuck those motherless assholes
Don’t let their mothers off that easy. Unless they’ve publicly spoken out against them, shame the mothers for raising monsters.
Donated! Thanks a lot for sharing!!
I donated, hope others with the means to do likewise. I know it’s a losing battle, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight.
o7
If it has Glaze built in to poison the pictures being scraped, what’s the pain? Bandwidth usage? Aren’t the scraped images useless/harmful to AI being trained on it?
They have Glaze as a built in tool on Cara to make the use of it more convenient and to raise awareness. But it‘s still the artists job to run their pictures through it. That means not every image on Cara has been glazed.
Also the last scraper claimed to have a way to undo the glazing although Glaze itself claims all previous attempts to break it have failed so far.
Oh I see, I would have thought it would automatically be applied to every image on upload.
The Chinesd company that feeds everything into AI while claming to be Anti-AI can go fuck itself: https://lemmy.world/comment/25295278
Also ever tried to sue a Russian/Chinese that stole your intellectual property? Good luck.
Also again: This company obviously doesn’t know how the Internet works. Your content is publicly on the Internet, you can’t completely stop people, bots or whatever from accessing it. That’s the way the web is designed and always was. Deal with it.
Just because one of the founders has Chinese roots doesn‘t mean it‘s a Chinese company. In fact Cara is based in the US and falls under Californian jurisdiction.
Also in their FAQ it says:
How does AI detection work on Cara?
Cara uses a third party service for AI image detection and moderation. As a small team with millions of images on the platform, we do not have the manpower to manually review every image uploaded.
We do not use any of our user’s data to train generative AI models, and we do not give permission to any third party service providers to train on our users’ data either.
Ah yes, the American Liberal, here to lecture us on the bad that CHINA does, when we do FAR worse every hour of every day - including AI scraping!
Damn those Chinese and their untrustworthy tech bros with their ill intentions towards our intellectual property! America would never! I mean we have so much more honor here! And if we don’t, it’s their fault! And if it isn’t then it should be! And they should deserve it!
Right?
