"Ben Lee, chief legal officer at Reddit, told The Register in an emailed statement that AI companies are desperate for quality content generated by real people and that need is fueling an industrial scale data laundering economy. "Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material," said Lee. "Reddit is a prime target because it's one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.""
"Lee claimed that Oxylabs UAB, a data scraping business based in Lithuania, AWM Proxy, a former Russian botnet, and SerpApi, which advertises real-time access to scraped Google search results, represent textbook examples of this sort of illegal behavior. "Unable to scrape Reddit directly, they mask their identities, hide their locations, and disguise their web scrapers to steal Reddit content from Google Search," said Lee."
Reddit filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against Perplexity AI and three data vendors: Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and SerpApi. Reddit alleges those vendors bypassed Reddit's and Google's defenses to harvest Reddit content and related search results, then sold that data to Perplexity instead of licensing it lawfully. Reddit characterizes the activity as an industrial-scale data laundering economy in which scrapers mask identities, hide locations, and disguise tools to steal content from Google Search. Reddit likens the vendors to would-be bank robbers and describes Perplexity as a willing customer of stolen data.
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