Just because it is possible -- or even easy -- to essentially steal from newspapers/other media outlets, doesn't make it right, or legal. The people behind it put in labor, financial resources, and time to create a product that, like almost every other service, has terms attached -- and those usually come with some form of monetization. Maybe it is a paywall, maybe it is advertisements -- but it is there.

Using an adblocker, or finding some loophole around a paywall, etc, are all very easy to do technically, as any reader of this site knows. That said, the media outlet doesn't have to allow it. And when it is violated on an industrial scale, like Perplexity, then they can be understandably upset and take legal action. And that includes any AI (or other technology, for that matter) that is a wrapper around plagiarism.

Sites opted in to Google originally because it fed them traffic. They most likely did not opt in to an AI rewriter that takes their work and republishes it without any compensation.

No fair plays done by people, even before the LLMs, so we get the PoW challenge on everywhere.

And what is that conclusion? since Adblockers are used by anywhere, it is OK to corporates not to license them directly and just yank them and put it into curation service? especially without ads? that's a licensing issue. the author allowed you to view the article if you provide them monetary support (i.e. ads), they didn't allow you to reproduce and republish the work by default.

also calling browser itself as reproducing? Yes, the data might be copied in memory (but I wouldn't call it as reproducing material, more like transfer from the server to another), but redistribution is the main point here.

It's like saying well, "the part of the variable is replicated to register from the L2 cache, so whole file on DRAM can be authorized to reproduce", Your point of calling "it's reproducing and should not be reproduced in first place" can't be prevented unless you bring non-turing computers that doesn't use active memory.

> Japan’s copyright law allows AI developers to train models on copyrighted material without permission. This leeway is a direct result of a 2018 amendment to Japan’s Copyright Act, meant to encourage AI development in the country’s tech sector. The law does not, however, allow for wholesale reproduction of those works, or for AI developers to distribute copies in a way that will “unreasonably prejudice the interests of the copyright owner.”

Seems to be a fairly recent trend. Wonder what changed.