In the past few months the MetaBrainz team has been fighting a battle against unscrupulous AI companies ignoring common courtesies (such as robots.txt) and scraping the Internet in order to build up their AI models. Rather than downloading our dataset in one complete download, they insist on loading all of MusicBrainz one page at a time. This of course would take hundreds of years to complete and is utterly pointless. In doing so, they are overloading our servers and preventing legitimate users from accessing our site.
These people are literally the new robber barons, they just vacuum up other people’s work in order to turn it into a model and make money off of it, should be illegal, but I guess now our economy is hinged on it. Wild.
markz@suppo.fi 4 days ago
Who knew that incompetence backed by mountains of money could be so destructive.