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
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.