Publishing something is considered by most to be sufficient consent for it to be not considered private.
I realize there's a whole legal quagmire here involved with intellectual "property" and what counts as "derivative work", but that's a whole separate (and dubiously useful) part of the law.
That is definitely normally true but I feel like the scale and LLM usage turns it into a different problem.
If you can use all of the content of stack overflow to create a “derivative work” that replaces stack overflow, and causes it to lose tons of revenue, is it really a derivative work?
I’m pretty sure solution sites like chegg don’t include the actual questions for that reason. The solutions to the questions are derivative, but the questions aren’t.
Stack overflow doesn't really have a legitimate claim to that data either though. Nor do the users, we're just pasting error messages and documentation. It's derivative all the way down. It'll never sit still and behave like property.
Privacy makes sense, treating data like property does not.
Point taken, but it still feels like a gray area to me. The value that SO created was the curation of knowledge and high quality discussions that were well indexed and searchable.
The users did provide the data, which is a good point. But there’s a reason SO was so useful to developers and quora was not. It also made it a perfect feeding ground for hungry LLMs.
Then again I’m just guessing that big models are trained on SO. Maybe that’s not true
Replacing stack overflow has no bearing on the definition of "derivative"