Freshly listed social media platform Reddit (NYSE:RDDT) warned technology companies that they will face legal action if found extracting data from the website without official permission.
The warning from Reddit (NYSE:RDDT)'s chief operating officer Jen Wong was reported by The Times over the weekend.
“Reddit produces a stunning amount of fresh information every minute of every day based on human experience,” She said. “We believe in having people use our data for the purposes of learning and research to benefit others, but when that crosses over into commercialisation, that’s different.”
Wong said access to this information needed to be used “appropriately” by companies.
Data scraping is a hot-button issue in the new world of artificial intelligence platforms that are trained on freely available information on the public internet.
AI-powered image-generation platforms Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are the subjects of numerous class-action lawsuits, including one brought by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz.
They allege that artists have had their rights infringed by companies training their AI tools on billions of images scraped from the web “without the consent of the original artists.”
ChatGPT developer OpenAI and financial backer Microsoft are being sued by the New York Times over alleged copyright violations.
Reddit enjoyed a successful debut on the New York Stock Exchange in March, when shares gained as much as 70% on the first day of trading.