Comment by jasonsb
3 hours ago
Of course this principle applies to Gmail too, if you’re willing to accept the absurdity. I could copy-paste copyrighted NYT snippets into emails and send them to everyone I know. Under the same logic, the NYT would be entitled to have access to everyone's Gmail account in order to verify who's sending what and get compensated if anyone is infringing their copyright.
That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.
I get that people are angry at OpenAI. But let’s not confuse outrage over one company with support for broken systems. Patent and copyright trolls thrive when we normalize overreach, whether it’s AI training data or email threads. If we let corporations weaponize IP law to control every digital whisper, we’re not protecting creators, we’re burying free expression under a mountain of lawsuits.
> That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.
If you made it your business to publish a newsletter containing copied NYT articles, then wouldn't they have the right to go after you and discover your sent emails?
Exactly, they wouldn't even need all of the emails in gmail for that example, just the ones from a specific account.
The real equivalent here would be if gmail itself was injecting NYT articles into your emails. I'm assuming in that scenario most people would see it as straightforward that gmail was infringing NYT content.