More Glitches in the ATS Matrix

[l0st]

Since I joined ATS, 20 years ago, people have been complaining that ATS is an echo chamber of those with ideas opposite to theirs.

Politics only made it worse.

That's a fact, jack.

I really just wish that in the end of this all, someone with a heart and a brain can see the damage they've done to the community with all this and at least allows the scraping of the original posts so that the research involved can be saved for future use.

I've taken a bit of a look at the legality of scraping and I'm reading mixed messages on the issue. On one hand, at least by US law and section 230, public comments aren't copy written - that is, if you post it publicly, you have no expectation that it will not be shared with others. On the other hand, there are already lawsuits flying around the scraping of public data for AI. Not sure where this leaves us.

I'm willing to resurrect my search engine for the purposes of scraping the message history for future search. It is unclear if to me if this stands on solid legal ground. I'll do what I can (say, scrape and provide copy of said DB and search function to access it to a site like this) but I don't want to be sued doing it. I think doing this for personal use is likey legal, but not sure sure about republication. Anyone with a law degree care to chime in?