A similar thing is happening to me. I worked on something for 3 years which I give away for free to help people and a thief took my software, ran it through ai to rebrand everything and relaunched as their own app. Unfortunately the ai missed a few Easter eggs I had hidden so the theft is undeniable. Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order. They refuse to look at or arbitrate. So now I'm on to fighting this in court on principal which is going to be expensive.
Theft is only going to become worse. It's already so easy and it's going to become even easier. We aren't prepared for what's ahead.
> Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order.
This is especially egregious in Google's case given how trigger happy they are with pulling YouTube videos with a simple claim that something is infringing. I guess unless you can lobby them at the level of the music industry, their default policy is to do nothing.
YouTube's take down infrastructure exists to prop up ad revenue. It was created by the industry and imposed on YouTube. There is no ad revenue on an App Store (to speak of) to protect so Google has no incentive to impose restrictions there that are purely DMCA-based. The incentives are misaligned between the app makers and the app distributors...structurally so.
Let's consider an independent dev making claims vs the army of lawyers from RIAA/MPAA type claimants. Which one do you think evilCorps will pay attention to?
This is why awards need to be based on % of total assets or revenue of the defendant. If little guy beats the big guy defendant, little guy should walk away with millions or billions. If big guy wins against the little guy defendant, it's just hundreds or thousands. It makes relatively poor individuals who can't afford a team of effective lawyers lawsuit proof, while making those who can wage effective lawfare juicy targets if they so much as fudge the line with the outside of their shoes!
>This is why awards need to be based on % of total assets or revenue of the defendant.
yes! and we need to add the death penalty to the list of punishments for children, because what matters is not the size of the crime, but the harshness of enforcement, that's the real deterrent, arewerite!?
I'm not I understand why you're asking me whether I think the phenomenon of intellectual property laws being enforced in a way that unfairly benefits the wealthy exists. Of course I do, that's why I brought it up in the first place. That doesn't mean it's defensible though.
reminds me of this woman who had copyright filed against her for playing moonlight sonata. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 if not for the complete hassle and threat to her livelihood, it might be laughable.
There's been a plague recently of people taking videogame songs from classic games and rapping over them, putting them on Soundcloud or other services, and then automating the copyright process. So people who are playing through Donkey Kong Country or Dynamite Heddy are getting videos copyright claimed by someone who likely wasn't even born when the games came out and has no legal right to.
If you released it under a free software license, then all they seem to have not done properly is putting an attribution text in their software. But you did not specify what license you used which already makes me doubt if you have the correct mental model around free software and it's ethos. Who makes money on what is not the main concern in free software ideology. It's a side question. It's the four freedoms that are the main points. Then there is the question of copyleft but you didn't specify your license so I won't elaborate on that. But even that doesn't block a rebranded release for sale.
"Gave away for free" does not mean they did so under a Free Software license. One could just put a copyright notice with NO license and they'd be in violation of the copyright.
Usually they do act, I believe. If they are following the DMCA they take the alleged infringing content down and notify the party that uploaded that content.
If that party files a claim stating that it is not infringing the host is required to forward that claim you, and then wait a short time (something like 10 business days, but I don't remember the exact time).
At the end of that wait if you have not provided proof that you filed a lawsuit against the alleged infringer the host restores the content. If you do provide such proof the content stays down until the court resolves the matter.
If you do not provide proof that you have sued and the content goes back up and then later you do so, you would need to get a preliminary injunction or similar from the court ordering the host to take it down.
Some big platforms (Google definitely) use their own systems in parallel to DMCA, so your experience with them (on both the copyright owner side and the copyright infringer side) can be quite a bit different if you are trying to deal with an infringement through that, but if you go through the DMCA channel that will work.
If you aren't ready to sue though and the infringer counter claims the material will go back up. You can think of the purpose of the DMCA in the case user content hosting as being to get the host out of the loop.
The advantages for the copyright owner of going through DMCA first instead of just suing right off the bat are that (1) in the case of accidental infringement the infringer probably will not counter claim and so one simple DMCA claim by you gets the content taken down and resolves the matter, (2) if they do counter claim, you get a copy of that which includes contact information which lets you know who to sue, and (3) the content will stay down until the suit is resolved whereas if you sued first it would likely stay up until you could get the court to issue a preliminary injunction.
Crazy shit. You should absolutely write about it, though. Stories like these need publicity to actually have people realize all type of IP will get affected.
I doubt people that are already systematically stealing material can't hide, or forge arbitrary identities.
Naming and shaming doesn't work for such attack vectors, it's a social strategy for people that have a real identity established and are making money out of that, not for ephemeral identities of such scammers.
You can't steal something which is free. This is what you should expect if you give away stuff for free to anybody who happens on it. To me it seems that FOSS people take perverse pleasure in these kind of things.
It's easy to prepare for what is ahead: Get yourself out of the filthy FOSS swamp and start charging a fair price for your work from real customers. That is something everybody benefits from and it is also dignified for everybody involved.
Sell the program or give it away for free, to me both is fine. But to release the source code for free, then complain that other people take it and sell it - that's ridiculous.
If I give away my secret sauce recipe, I have no right to complain if somebody puts it in a bottle and sells it. Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.
Governments have presented us with a third option, intellectual property, which allows a creator to release their intellectual contributions publicly while preventing someone else from reproducing it. Violating the terms of an open source license are generally considered intellectual property violations and allow the creator to seek damages.
Good luck with that. If you throw your wallet onto a busy street corner, then by the law nobody is allowed to take it either. But cops will tell you that they have more important things to take care of than victims who take every measurable action at hand to make themselves victims.
Thankfully, you don’t need cops to pursue a civil case.
I don’t know why you’re pretending as if this is some Herculean effort. This is pretty well tread territory at this point, see Jacobsen v. Katzer. Katzer was forced to settle for $100k in 2010 for violating the license on Jacobsen’s model train software that had been uploaded to SourceForge.
Every book contains all of its content. It's "open source" by necessity. Are you saying that if you buy a book, you can do with the contents of the book whatever you want?
Computer code is not comparable to a book. A better comparison would be a blueprint or a recipe. If Coca-Cola publishes their recipe wide and far for anybody to read, would you rage together with them when another beverage company starts selling drinks together with them?
Now, be nice. This isn't Reddit, and I don't think the HN mods are really into "engagement"*
I tend to release a lot of stuff MIT. I don't give a shit, if anyone takes it and gets rich (which I seriously doubt will happen). It's just that I don't want people coming after me, if they misuse it.
If, however, someone rereleases my stuff with a "gift," and makes it appear that I was behind it, then that's a Bozo no-no. I think that kind of thing is going on at GitHub, right now.
Ironically, the article points out that the original authors publisher actually put out two DMCA notices to google last year, apparently with no effect.
I guess DMCA takedowns are only for the big fish fighting the good fight against car pirates.
then DMCA the entirety of google and alphabet, and tender class action for direct and contributory violation, with the option to back it off to the literary work in question when goog takes a seat at the table and takes it seriously
Why aren't they suing Google in court? Now is the best time to do this politically, the site doesn't mention what state they live in but I'd doubt that you wouldn't be able to get a state AG to listen to you if you reached out.
edit to add: Google has ignored all safe harbor protections, they would lose this protection and be held liable for all damages. This seems like a pretty solid win for the author here if they're telling the truth.
There are a lot of really solid reasons someone might choose not to sue one of the world’s most powerful corporations over their core business practices, even being completely in the right. Pretty similar to reasons someone might not call the cops on some mafiosos that are blocking your driveway while fencing a truckload of stolen electronics.
The entire purpose of the DMCA is that it’s a bludgeon that the rich and powerful can use to beat the poor and powerless. It was never meant for individual copyright owners to use against giant infringing corporations.
Speaking from experience, neither apple nor Google will enforce dmca takedown requests unless they come from the courts. Even when provided clear and direct evidence. Their position is "we do not arbitrate". I sort of get it but also the cost barrier to copyright infringement is headed to zero while the ability to protect your IP and enforce your copyright remains expensive. Wild times ahead.
The blind spot is the same one that's always there. Takedown notices from partners are fast tracked, takedown notices from Joe Bob require a court filing.
(It makes some degree of sense - I shouldn't be able to use a burner identity to get Google to take down (even temporarily) a million-subscriber channel. The big problem with the DMCA is the impossibility of proving that a grey-area filer is acting in bad faith, but that's in the wheelhouse of the courts, not the platforms.)
DMCA to take down AI slop? I feel that is twice the mistake. DMCA should not exist in the first place. Neither should AI slop. Here we have AI stealing from people. AI is a thief.
So you're against copyright protection, but also against AI using copyrighted work? I can understand both of those positions separately, but how can you combine them in the same statement?
Yes, I am. Copyright is legalized plunder of anyone who does not pay a protection fee for a "license" to not be plundered. Going after torrenters and people trying to regain functionality on their thermostats and 3D printers is legalized plunder.
there are two different things — one can be against the idea of copyright property, or just copyright laws as written into the legal system, while holding the expectation these should apply to everyone equally
Sure, there are plenty of things to dislike about DMCA or any other modern copyright law, but in this context the discussion was specifically about using DMCA to take down an unauthorized republishing of a copyrighted book online, which is a pretty normal application of copyright law. So I don't really understand how "AI is bad because it's trained on stolen work" but also "it's bad to take legal action against people distributing your work".
There seem to be people who believe that the DMCA is a morally compromised instrument.
There are people that believe that using a morally compromised instrument to do a moral end is always bad.
"AI is bad because it's trained on stolen work therefore we must never use AI, even if our ends are good" is such a belief that many people seem to have, and there seems to be some likelihood that the original poster might be such a person.
Therefore it seems to me reasonable to believe that a person who maybe believes that you must never use AI because it is trained on stolen work, could also believe that you must never use the DMCA because it is based on bad and corrupted law.
I myself do not exactly believe these things, although I consider they may have some arguments for them, albeit not arguments likely to persuade me in all instances, nonetheless I do not find any difficulty in believing someone could hold both opinions at the same time and I think, in fact, it is a reasonably consistent pair of opinions, especially given the apparent ability of people to believe all sorts of inconsistent things day to day.
How do you suggest Qontour be held accountable for this blatant theft of Koenig's work and name if the DMCA is a mistake?
And don't pass the blame off onto "AI" from the people who said "let's make a web site that totally steals this book we like". AI is a tool of thieves, founded upon thievery. Qontour is an agency made up of thieves who are using AI to perform their thievery.
Gala Aranaga, Founder & CEO of Qontour, is a thief.
Jason Chandler, Founder & Creative Director of Qontour, is a thief.
Atif Fazil, Technical Director of Qontour, is a thief.
Pemi Ogunkeye, Webflow Developer at Qontour, is a thief.
Daniela Aranaga, Head of Content & Marketing at Qontour, is a thief.
Ahmed Qayyum, Solutions Architect at Qontour, is a thief.
Bukunmi Ogunmodede, Webflow Developer at Qontour, is a thief.
Hassaan Rasul, Senior UX Designer at Qontour, is a thief.
They used ChatGPT, a copyrightwashing tool developed in a massive act of thievery by the employees of OpenAI, all of whom are thieves. OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, all of whom are thieves.
From the article I guess Qontour reproduced the entire text verbatim.
> it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms... all penned by Koenig.
So it doesn't seem likely to me that they asked AI to make a fan site and it spat out the book; instead they asked AI to make a fan site and then copy-pasted the text of the book into it.
Perhaps a just outcome would be for Koenig to gain the rights to the page. However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way.
> However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way.
I hate this so much. Not you or your post, just that it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking.
Claude’s also technically right but wrong where it matters. The author could easily offer to settle for control of the site instead of suing. If the author registered the copyright to the book, he doesn’t even need to prove damages to be awarded statutory damages. He potentially has a lot of leverage.
I can't tell you how many times a week claude opus 4.8 high effort has to apologise for being wrong when I'm asking it about something narrow and specific that i want it to research but it blurts out broad context from its training material and incorrect conclusions/assumptions. This is happening all the time. Someone needs to create a repository of its apologies to remind us all of its limitations.
My company instituted a monthly "best use of AI" award to encourage people to share how they're using it. I suggested we should also have a "most wrong AI output" award to remind everyone they can't just trust it blindly but that hasn't happened yet for some reason ...
I’ve noticed the same thing at work with Opus 4.8.
ChatGPT on my personal plan does it too. Just yesterday I asked it to give some places fitting a specific criteria. The first was that they were within a 2 hour drive of my city. 75% of the locations it gave me were more than 2x that distance. It kept doing this across multiple difference searches. I tried high and pro with no difference.
That's not surprising, LLMs are bad at pulling hyperspecific facts out of memory. LLMs aren't mapping applications, they're reasoners. Just a poor problem fit
No they aren't. They're statistical token generators. They do not understand concepts such as "distance from a given location or coordinate point". If you're lucky you might ask it something likely to appear nearly verbatim in its training data, like "Chinese restaurants in Midtown Manhattan", and get back a reasonably accurate list, but it does not understand what a "Chinese restaurant" is, or what "Midtown Manhattan" is, or that one relates to the other in any way other than both appearing statistically associated with another set of tokens when they appear near each other.
> the best way to get correct answers on HN isn't to ask questions, but to post LLM's answers so people will eagerly fact check them to prove LLMs wrong.
> it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking
That would be an improvement over most people I know at this point, who casually repeat verbally or repost words they got from a chatbot without so much as a quotation mark.
The “claude says” is the part this pisses me off about LLM use now. If I wanted a Claude answer I’d ask Claude. If I ask a human I want a human response not a “here’s what Claude said”.
Every reply to my comment has been complaining about the single line quoting Claude. People don't want a human response either, they just want to complain about LLMs.
> it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking.
And without sharing the prompt or the actual response. Like sure, it's possible Claude said something so obviously wrong. Depending on your experience, you might even think it to be probable.
But then why wouldn't OP preempt any doubt and simply share the part that matters? What are we doing.
> Nearly every day, I get emailed a newly-launched, obviously-vibecoded website filled with AI-generated content that was designed to siphon attention away from human creators: bloggers, authors, journalists, artists, musicians, and anyone else who slowly, painstakingly makes things for a living. I’m not even sure anymore that the emails I’m receiving are sent by a human.
We did it guys! This and the recent NYT article about the deepfake expert who can no longer trust his eyes when analyzing deepfakes, makes me hopeful that Silicon Valley will finally realize its dream of destroying human society.
I would posit that it may be because of your statement in your previous comment about "something they can't control" and it is possible the person replying to you finds it relevant whether who their partners are is something they could control, which is consistent with a literal reading of their question, asking whether they can't control who their partners are.
Just to be clear: The bootleg site is pointing to the Amazon listing of the actual book (ISBN 9781501153648, Simon & Schuster, published 2021). The Amazon link is not pointing to an AI slop version of the book.
So how is the bootleg site making money? The Amazon link was created with Amazon Associates, the Amazon affiliate program (you can see the affiliate link code, tag=promptdigital-20, in the Amazon URI).
This is how AI slop can be monetized: poorly gated Amazon programs like Amazon KDP, Amazon Associates, and that Meta monetization program. Anything goes, from crafty scams like this to over-the-top social media slop like shrimp Jesus.
How are they stealing from Amazon? They delivered a sale to Amazon, which Amazon has a program to reward the effort of delivering that sale. In no way should this be misconstrued as my supporting of the action, but I'm also not delusional making baseless accusations.
Things need to be advertised. Most advertising is not free. The amount of money spent on an affiliate link is less than what it would to advertise to the same customer the affiliate is sending.
On the list of things that make this possible, AI comes after the anonymity of web sites and of companies (per another comment, Prompt Digital Inc (DBA Qontour) - which is who exactly?), and the fact that the infringer has complete control over their reach.
The asymmetry between stealing and getting caught or stopped was baked in long before AI, but this will become much more prevalent because the cost of infringing has been reduced by orders of magnitude.
Relatedly, legal copying seems just as problematic: I see both software and media being munged and parroted as soon as it appears, which means innovators do not get the benefit of their innovation. I personally have halted any projects where I can't completely control access to the product, which is a huge damper on innovation.
This reminds me of when a bunch of cryptobros paid a ludicrous sum for one of the pitch bibles for Jodorowsky's unmade film adaptation of Dune and assumed that owning this rare object gave them license to pitch movie adaptations of it. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a38815538/dune-c...
I ran into something like this a few months ago. There was this new indie game, Idols of Ash, that had just released and was blowing up on streaming. I googled it and found what looked like a legit site, idolsofash.fun. It had detailed strategy guides, screenshots, and even an embedded copy of the game. But the embed was buggy, so I searched for the game's itch.io page and left a comment.
Turns out the "fansite" was unaffiliated, and after playing the real game, it became clear the whole site was AI slop. It got gameplay mechanics subtly wrong, the screenshots didn't always relate to the captions, and the embed was a shoddy decompilation pulled from the game's files (easy since it was built with the Godot engine, and presumably where the site's knowledge of the game came from). It's apparently something afflicting a lot of indie devs -- somebody uses Claude or similar to rip your game and spin up a detailed site where you can play it for free. Not sure what the angle is, though, since the site says it's unofficial in the footer, links to the official Itch storefront, and doesn't insert ads or malware. Could just be an overzealous fan, but the whole thing struck me as very strange.
I'm interested to see if this is the whole story[0], but on the surface it sure is infuriating.
[0] this article and a bsky post by the author of the article are the only sources I can find other than the website itself - which is definitely as chock full of AI as indicated
What's funny is that if you go to the linked site that's meant to be a showcase of the design agency's design skills, you'll see that it's ... pretty shit.
AI laundering is going to become a major tactic in all domains. Fiction and nonfiction writing, software, video, music, you name it.
It's easy to take GPL software and rewrite it in another language without the license. Trivially easy. It's possible you'll even be able to do the same with just compiled bytecode soon.
Just recently there was an instance where Nous Research Hermes agent cloned some Chinese OSS. It's happening much more broadly than this, though.
This might warrant special attention unless we want to live in a world without copyright. Though that's also one additional possible outcome.
I experimented with turning out complete airport thriller novels this way, using earlier LLMs. It's not terribly hard to make this happen, the hard part wasn't gunning out prose, it was plot arcs and internal consistency, but even that was suprisingly easy to solve.
Of course I didn't do anything with the idea, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
I don't think they are meant to be parodies. Parodies poke comedic fun at the originals. These are meant to confuse someone into buying the wrong version of a popular film. That's why they make sure the names and even the covers look as identical as they can without getting sued.
Literally this is our future, many devs still don't seem to believe we will be able to "zeroshot" everything, but it's because they haven't experienced themselves proper tooling (at the minimum leveraging 4 models in debate, adversarial and loops and workflows and so-on and unli-loop until completion, MITM everything...), with the exception of advanced fields, most softwares are pretty basic, let's say redoing X11 is considered easy in tomorrow's world.
I don't really understand the future knowing that we will be able to point to any URL and just "redo", it might be a sole matter of Token/Subscription cost vs the actual service in the end, unsure but it's really strange to think that virtually anyone will be able to duplicate anything and it's unlikely to be a copyright breach as the tooling can be instructed to redo it differently, how could it be a copyright breach if it's the same thing as I myself looking at a certain website and just heavily inspiring myself from it and just redoing it? The fact that it's done automatically shouldn't change that.
I am allowed today to take a GPLv3 program or a commercial program, redo it and publish it as MIT, so why would it be forbidden, it's terrifying.
> The fact that it's done automatically shouldn't change that
Except it changes everything as copyright as a concept was introduced to balance the power between those whose works scale and those whose works don't. By the time it was authors vs printing press. That was the sole reason why copyright became a thing.
It's not to prevent people from copying things. It's just to distribute economic benefits between different partis so all participants are incented enough to keep working. And what can be done automatically changes the balance a lot.
Honestly though, even if this is the future what kind of creator is going to participate in that? Why would anyone put effort in substantial ideas that can just be stolen with a click?
But in this future you described where we can magically one shot stuff, why would anyone use services from businesses and keep paying them? Why not just zero shot it with LLM and keep your money?
Businesses will not keep building if they don't have users, so why would they?
I think you are criminally underrating what goes in a business other than just product or tech. It is extremely hard to write or create a company that makes actual revenue, code/product is maybe 20% of it. Maybe you can say okay so AI will do the remaining 80% of it as well since its so smart. And it might but its even more of a long shot imo.
This is why OpenAI, Adobe, et al, are trying to take away personal computing, putting much of it into the cloud and squeezing component costs. Why they're trying to get us to accept guardrails on AI for moral hazard reasons. Why Anthropic intentionally gimps its models if it detects AI research.
They are the monopolists and we are the paypigs! NEVER SUBSCRIBE!
Pretty much a nonsensical and random comment, but I'll respond.
How would OpenAI function without the cloud? You literally cannot run the frontier models on any consumer-grade hardware.
Adobe lets you run its software on your personal computer (charges licensing costs for it).
They are monopolists for different reasons.
My point was that vibe-coding LLMs will not help individuals replace Adobe or OpenAI. It is very unlikely that these businesses will go away because of vibe coding or local AI models.
I agree. But I don't understand why the focus is always on FOSS. Why don't proprietary IP owners fear this too? Won't music, movies and non-FOSS software also have their copyright laundered if this crap continues?
I think because a proprietary IP owner can allocate some budget to sue the infringers. A community of OSS contributors may lack the money, the will or the know-how to do that.
They will also face a much harder task when explaining their case to a judge. The contributors to the open-source chess engine Stockfish needed a lot of time and energy to convince a German court that it was illegal for the commercial engine Houdini to copy their algorithms.
The system is kind of working as intended? The publisher sent them a DMCA takedown notice, and since the site failed to take down the offending content, the publisher is fully within their rights to (1) contact the hosting provider and ask them to take down the entire site (2) contact the registrar and ask them to suspend the site (3) contact Google and request delisting of the site (the one department of Google that actually moves at a non-glacial pace) (4) take legal action against the John Doe behind the site and unmask them, maybe even garnishing their Amazon affiliate revenue.
The sooner you act, the better. But it seems like the publisher didn't bother with any of that, or they're just slow and are getting around to it. The author of the book couldn't even be bothered to respond to the blog author's question about it.
Correction: some random tiny scam company copied a book without permission in blatant violation of copyright law, and AI was briefly and tangentially involved with the final product.
In other words: AI stole someone’s soul with its own metallic claws! Out with the devil machines.
Not sure what your point is; the title doesn't claim "AI stole the book", it says "an agency stole the book and used AI to republish it", which is true.
The article is titled "The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows", whereas the HN title is (currently) "Agency stole bestselling author's book, used AI to relaunch as their own".
So it seems reasonable to infer that the submitter felt that emphasizing the AI angle would be the part worth discussing.
The article fully embraces these weakly-connected insinuations:
"But it’s not surprising to see it coming from an agency that has leaned into generative AI so heavily. As they proudly explain, “Every page on this site was written in Claude” using an “author persona” that they call “Q.” [ADVERTISEMENT FOR CLAUDE (yes, really)] "What’s missing here is consent, which feels like the original sin of AI. As I’ve written about many times before, generative AI models are all trained on a massive corpus of human-authored works without attribution, consent, or compensation, extracting value from creators while centralizing power among a tiny handful of massive tech companies."
I'm going to die of old age in this world where no-one can feel safe to make any small, unrelated, irrelevant, unpopular, ugly, worthless thing without the threat of being fed to the lawyers.
No-one is seriously fighting the tyranny of copyright that covers basically the whole world. Even AI companies just retreated and hid after they got what they needed, like a shy teenager with empty wallet who still craves access culture, with no real attempts to change the system.
Meta is only putting up a token fight because it has been directly sued, but we all know how this ends: they will eventually bend the knee. They accessed human culture for practical, not moral reasons.
That's clear evidence that human culture was sucked dry and is no longer needed. OpenAI won't fight to open access to Anna's Archive because they no longer can get any benefit from using it in training. They can pay reddit and such for trickle of their fresh drivel. But the usefulness of any book ever written ran out some years ago and new ones are just riffs of the old ones so not really worthy of pursuing.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is the present and the future and human output becomes something not worth (or legal) to even cite in any interesting volume.
According to the article, 'Qontour' AKA 'Prompt Digital' simply took the full text of a modern copyrighted and published book and made an official-looking website out of it with affiliate links to the real book. If you agree with copyright at all, then this is just blatant, intentional infringement for commercial gain.
This story has practically nothing to do with AI. It could have been done 20 years ago, the crappy Midjouney illustrations and generative text interface merely add insult to injury.
They basically liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo for their most likely one (three?) person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom.
The title made me think that he released a paperback that competes with the original.
> If you agree with copyright at all
The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution (which the rest of copyright makes often hard for purely financial reasons). So whoever made this silly little thing gets a pass from me.
> He basically liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo for their most likely one person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom.
What is your basis for this belief?
Did you read the part about the obviously intentionally-added affiliate links to the original book?
> The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution [...] So whoever made this silly little thing gets a pass from me.
Did you read the part about the fake site appearing higher in search results for the author's own name?
> Did you read the part about the obviously intentionally-added affiliate links to the original book?
I find it nice that they linked to the original book. For every x earned let the original author earn many times more. It's probably a better deal than the author got from their legal publisher.
> Did you read the part about the fake site appearing higher in search results for the author's own name?
And who's fault is that? Google? Or this little slop maker that I'm (again stupidly) assuming is not a SEO hacker.
> I find it nice that they linked to the original book. For every x earned let the original author earn many times more.
> It's probably a better deal than the author got from their legal publisher.
These two statements sound contradictory to me.
> And who's fault is that? Google? Or this little slop maker that I'm (again stupidly) assuming is not a SEO hacker.
Why not both? I think there's plenty of blame to go around.
Also, the publisher who presumably convinced the author that it would be a good idea to assign them exclusive rights. The affiliate link the blog post refers to as "the author's own" actually belongs to the publisher.
If that doesn't look like a marooned freelancer down on their luck I don't what does.
I mean, what's your read on this?
Is this a person who secretly hates the book and the author and re-published its contents because he knows that people who have the content will never, ever purchase a book, no matter how much they like it? And he provides the links to buy the book only for plausible deniability and makes them affiliates for even more plausible deniability fully knowing nobody will ever now buy this book?
Or is he a grifter trying to earn heaps of money with affiliate links to one obscure book providing it with better visibility through SEO tricks Google is powerless against even though they are in this business for nearly three decades? And he also published the full text of the book because of ... how does this helps him earn more money exactly? I ran out of ideas.
And the most important question. Is this person a worthy target of the internet wrath?
We're discussing a blog post about a blatantly plagiarized website, and the ethical environment and professional choices that led to its creation and continued existence. We get to do that.
This isn't Reddit and we aren't "the internet". We aren't brigading and organizing harassment or whatever here.
That is why the particulars of the web designer's personal life and state of mind are mostly uninteresting.
DMCA only applies to 1:1 copy, if you used AI to convert it to something else, then DMCA is the wrong tool.
It's ultimately a fruitless endeavor to go after because you would have to prove that you can use the said AI tool to create the exact word by word copy and that is going to be very expensive and shaky in court
I think its time that we stop extracting rent from outdated copyright laws. Once AI gets good enough you aren't going to be bothering with them anyway. All copyright law does is put money in the pockets of those that created the law and a portion of that goes to the creator.
A similar thing is happening to me. I worked on something for 3 years which I give away for free to help people and a thief took my software, ran it through ai to rebrand everything and relaunched as their own app. Unfortunately the ai missed a few Easter eggs I had hidden so the theft is undeniable. Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order. They refuse to look at or arbitrate. So now I'm on to fighting this in court on principal which is going to be expensive.
Theft is only going to become worse. It's already so easy and it's going to become even easier. We aren't prepared for what's ahead.
> Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order.
This is especially egregious in Google's case given how trigger happy they are with pulling YouTube videos with a simple claim that something is infringing. I guess unless you can lobby them at the level of the music industry, their default policy is to do nothing.
YouTube's take down infrastructure exists to prop up ad revenue. It was created by the industry and imposed on YouTube. There is no ad revenue on an App Store (to speak of) to protect so Google has no incentive to impose restrictions there that are purely DMCA-based. The incentives are misaligned between the app makers and the app distributors...structurally so.
Let's consider an independent dev making claims vs the army of lawyers from RIAA/MPAA type claimants. Which one do you think evilCorps will pay attention to?
This is why awards need to be based on % of total assets or revenue of the defendant. If little guy beats the big guy defendant, little guy should walk away with millions or billions. If big guy wins against the little guy defendant, it's just hundreds or thousands. It makes relatively poor individuals who can't afford a team of effective lawyers lawsuit proof, while making those who can wage effective lawfare juicy targets if they so much as fudge the line with the outside of their shoes!
> with the outside of their shoes!
But it's the outside of the boot that lets you bend it. (yeah, I'm watching a World Cup match as I type this)
>This is why awards need to be based on % of total assets or revenue of the defendant.
yes! and we need to add the death penalty to the list of punishments for children, because what matters is not the size of the crime, but the harshness of enforcement, that's the real deterrent, arewerite!?
Ridiculous. The initial proposal was to improve proportionality, what are you on about here?
I'm not I understand why you're asking me whether I think the phenomenon of intellectual property laws being enforced in a way that unfairly benefits the wealthy exists. Of course I do, that's why I brought it up in the first place. That doesn't mean it's defensible though.
The lawyers from evilCorps are on a first-name basis with the key lawyers from the copyright lobby, because their fates are fully intertwined
reminds me of this woman who had copyright filed against her for playing moonlight sonata. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27004577 if not for the complete hassle and threat to her livelihood, it might be laughable.
There's been a plague recently of people taking videogame songs from classic games and rapping over them, putting them on Soundcloud or other services, and then automating the copyright process. So people who are playing through Donkey Kong Country or Dynamite Heddy are getting videos copyright claimed by someone who likely wasn't even born when the games came out and has no legal right to.
Rick Beato[0] is famous for some of his rants on the topic.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/RickBeato
If you released it under a free software license, then all they seem to have not done properly is putting an attribution text in their software. But you did not specify what license you used which already makes me doubt if you have the correct mental model around free software and it's ethos. Who makes money on what is not the main concern in free software ideology. It's a side question. It's the four freedoms that are the main points. Then there is the question of copyleft but you didn't specify your license so I won't elaborate on that. But even that doesn't block a rebranded release for sale.
"Gave away for free" does not mean they did so under a Free Software license. One could just put a copyright notice with NO license and they'd be in violation of the copyright.
> Google and Apple are useless for dmca unless you have a court order.
They deserve to also be sued too for the infringement. I don't think safe-harbor applies if they don't act on a valid notice.
Usually they do act, I believe. If they are following the DMCA they take the alleged infringing content down and notify the party that uploaded that content.
If that party files a claim stating that it is not infringing the host is required to forward that claim you, and then wait a short time (something like 10 business days, but I don't remember the exact time).
At the end of that wait if you have not provided proof that you filed a lawsuit against the alleged infringer the host restores the content. If you do provide such proof the content stays down until the court resolves the matter.
If you do not provide proof that you have sued and the content goes back up and then later you do so, you would need to get a preliminary injunction or similar from the court ordering the host to take it down.
Some big platforms (Google definitely) use their own systems in parallel to DMCA, so your experience with them (on both the copyright owner side and the copyright infringer side) can be quite a bit different if you are trying to deal with an infringement through that, but if you go through the DMCA channel that will work.
If you aren't ready to sue though and the infringer counter claims the material will go back up. You can think of the purpose of the DMCA in the case user content hosting as being to get the host out of the loop.
The advantages for the copyright owner of going through DMCA first instead of just suing right off the bat are that (1) in the case of accidental infringement the infringer probably will not counter claim and so one simple DMCA claim by you gets the content taken down and resolves the matter, (2) if they do counter claim, you get a copy of that which includes contact information which lets you know who to sue, and (3) the content will stay down until the suit is resolved whereas if you sued first it would likely stay up until you could get the court to issue a preliminary injunction.
Crazy shit. You should absolutely write about it, though. Stories like these need publicity to actually have people realize all type of IP will get affected.
Name and shame. I'd be furious if I were one of the thief's tricked customers.
I doubt people that are already systematically stealing material can't hide, or forge arbitrary identities.
Naming and shaming doesn't work for such attack vectors, it's a social strategy for people that have a real identity established and are making money out of that, not for ephemeral identities of such scammers.
You would, most consumers wouldn't.
You can't steal something which is free. This is what you should expect if you give away stuff for free to anybody who happens on it. To me it seems that FOSS people take perverse pleasure in these kind of things.
It's easy to prepare for what is ahead: Get yourself out of the filthy FOSS swamp and start charging a fair price for your work from real customers. That is something everybody benefits from and it is also dignified for everybody involved.
"FOSS" doesn't mean that you cannot monetize your program.
It's just that people have taken different routes historically.
Sell the program or give it away for free, to me both is fine. But to release the source code for free, then complain that other people take it and sell it - that's ridiculous.
If I give away my secret sauce recipe, I have no right to complain if somebody puts it in a bottle and sells it. Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.
> Either you keep it to yourself or you don't.
Governments have presented us with a third option, intellectual property, which allows a creator to release their intellectual contributions publicly while preventing someone else from reproducing it. Violating the terms of an open source license are generally considered intellectual property violations and allow the creator to seek damages.
Good luck with that. If you throw your wallet onto a busy street corner, then by the law nobody is allowed to take it either. But cops will tell you that they have more important things to take care of than victims who take every measurable action at hand to make themselves victims.
Thankfully, you don’t need cops to pursue a civil case.
I don’t know why you’re pretending as if this is some Herculean effort. This is pretty well tread territory at this point, see Jacobsen v. Katzer. Katzer was forced to settle for $100k in 2010 for violating the license on Jacobsen’s model train software that had been uploaded to SourceForge.
There are a lot of things that are immoral (or just rude) to do but not explicitly illegal
Personally I would prefer to live in a society filled with people who are better than thinking "well there's no law against it so it's 100% fine"
Edit: I also don't want to live in a society where every tiny piece of social decency must be encoded in laws to get people to actually be decent
Every book contains all of its content. It's "open source" by necessity. Are you saying that if you buy a book, you can do with the contents of the book whatever you want?
Computer code is not comparable to a book. A better comparison would be a blueprint or a recipe. If Coca-Cola publishes their recipe wide and far for anybody to read, would you rage together with them when another beverage company starts selling drinks together with them?
Computer code is also not comparable with a wallet thrown onto a busy street corner.
Can you decide, whether you are OK with unfit comparisons or not, instead of trying to have it both ways?
> the filthy FOSS swamp
Now, be nice. This isn't Reddit, and I don't think the HN mods are really into "engagement"*
I tend to release a lot of stuff MIT. I don't give a shit, if anyone takes it and gets rich (which I seriously doubt will happen). It's just that I don't want people coming after me, if they misuse it.
If, however, someone rereleases my stuff with a "gift," and makes it appear that I was behind it, then that's a Bozo no-no. I think that kind of thing is going on at GitHub, right now.
*Mud-wrestling in a cesspool
This is exactly what DMCA takedowns are actually for.
Ironically, the article points out that the original authors publisher actually put out two DMCA notices to google last year, apparently with no effect.
I guess DMCA takedowns are only for the big fish fighting the good fight against car pirates.
then DMCA the entirety of google and alphabet, and tender class action for direct and contributory violation, with the option to back it off to the literary work in question when goog takes a seat at the table and takes it seriously
That costs money
so does loosing a business.
Simon & Schuster is a small fish?
Why aren't they suing Google in court? Now is the best time to do this politically, the site doesn't mention what state they live in but I'd doubt that you wouldn't be able to get a state AG to listen to you if you reached out.
edit to add: Google has ignored all safe harbor protections, they would lose this protection and be held liable for all damages. This seems like a pretty solid win for the author here if they're telling the truth.
There are a lot of really solid reasons someone might choose not to sue one of the world’s most powerful corporations over their core business practices, even being completely in the right. Pretty similar to reasons someone might not call the cops on some mafiosos that are blocking your driveway while fencing a truckload of stolen electronics.
DMCA is no longer valid as the courts ruled that stealing literally everything on the internet was OK and a valid business practice.
Eventually almost every other regulation turns out to be one that benefits big players and doesn’t help smaller ones.
Usually it’s easy enough to see who’s pushing for the regulation to figure out who will benefit from it.
Eg https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/06/16/congress/me...
The entire purpose of the DMCA is that it’s a bludgeon that the rich and powerful can use to beat the poor and powerless. It was never meant for individual copyright owners to use against giant infringing corporations.
Speaking from experience, neither apple nor Google will enforce dmca takedown requests unless they come from the courts. Even when provided clear and direct evidence. Their position is "we do not arbitrate". I sort of get it but also the cost barrier to copyright infringement is headed to zero while the ability to protect your IP and enforce your copyright remains expensive. Wild times ahead.
And in this case, they didn't work. Perhaps Qontour, as a web-native dev firm, has figured out a blind spot in Google's DMCA takedown process?
The blind spot is the same one that's always there. Takedown notices from partners are fast tracked, takedown notices from Joe Bob require a court filing.
(It makes some degree of sense - I shouldn't be able to use a burner identity to get Google to take down (even temporarily) a million-subscriber channel. The big problem with the DMCA is the impossibility of proving that a grey-area filer is acting in bad faith, but that's in the wheelhouse of the courts, not the platforms.)
DMCA to take down AI slop? I feel that is twice the mistake. DMCA should not exist in the first place. Neither should AI slop. Here we have AI stealing from people. AI is a thief.
So you're against copyright protection, but also against AI using copyrighted work? I can understand both of those positions separately, but how can you combine them in the same statement?
>So you're against copyright protection
Yes, I am. Copyright is legalized plunder of anyone who does not pay a protection fee for a "license" to not be plundered. Going after torrenters and people trying to regain functionality on their thermostats and 3D printers is legalized plunder.
there are two different things — one can be against the idea of copyright property, or just copyright laws as written into the legal system, while holding the expectation these should apply to everyone equally
I mean one can be for copyright protection but against the DMCA as a bad way to implement copyright protection.
Sure, there are plenty of things to dislike about DMCA or any other modern copyright law, but in this context the discussion was specifically about using DMCA to take down an unauthorized republishing of a copyrighted book online, which is a pretty normal application of copyright law. So I don't really understand how "AI is bad because it's trained on stolen work" but also "it's bad to take legal action against people distributing your work".
There seem to be people who believe that the DMCA is a morally compromised instrument.
There are people that believe that using a morally compromised instrument to do a moral end is always bad.
"AI is bad because it's trained on stolen work therefore we must never use AI, even if our ends are good" is such a belief that many people seem to have, and there seems to be some likelihood that the original poster might be such a person.
Therefore it seems to me reasonable to believe that a person who maybe believes that you must never use AI because it is trained on stolen work, could also believe that you must never use the DMCA because it is based on bad and corrupted law.
I myself do not exactly believe these things, although I consider they may have some arguments for them, albeit not arguments likely to persuade me in all instances, nonetheless I do not find any difficulty in believing someone could hold both opinions at the same time and I think, in fact, it is a reasonably consistent pair of opinions, especially given the apparent ability of people to believe all sorts of inconsistent things day to day.
Lehman (a lobbyist) did an end-run around congress to the WIPO, to use treaty law to force the passage of the DMCA.
How do you suggest Qontour be held accountable for this blatant theft of Koenig's work and name if the DMCA is a mistake?
And don't pass the blame off onto "AI" from the people who said "let's make a web site that totally steals this book we like". AI is a tool of thieves, founded upon thievery. Qontour is an agency made up of thieves who are using AI to perform their thievery.
In fact let's go down their about page (https://www.qontour.com/about) and point some fingers:
Gala Aranaga, Founder & CEO of Qontour, is a thief.
Jason Chandler, Founder & Creative Director of Qontour, is a thief.
Atif Fazil, Technical Director of Qontour, is a thief.
Pemi Ogunkeye, Webflow Developer at Qontour, is a thief.
Daniela Aranaga, Head of Content & Marketing at Qontour, is a thief.
Ahmed Qayyum, Solutions Architect at Qontour, is a thief.
Bukunmi Ogunmodede, Webflow Developer at Qontour, is a thief.
Hassaan Rasul, Senior UX Designer at Qontour, is a thief.
They used ChatGPT, a copyrightwashing tool developed in a massive act of thievery by the employees of OpenAI, all of whom are thieves. OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, all of whom are thieves.
What exactly did AI steal? The concept of clocks?
AI is not involved in the actual copyrighted content at all.
From the article I guess Qontour reproduced the entire text verbatim.
> it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms... all penned by Koenig.
So it doesn't seem likely to me that they asked AI to make a fan site and it spat out the book; instead they asked AI to make a fan site and then copy-pasted the text of the book into it.
Perhaps a just outcome would be for Koenig to gain the rights to the page. However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way.
> However, Claude says unfortunately copyright law doesn't work that way.
I hate this so much. Not you or your post, just that it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking.
Claude’s also technically right but wrong where it matters. The author could easily offer to settle for control of the site instead of suing. If the author registered the copyright to the book, he doesn’t even need to prove damages to be awarded statutory damages. He potentially has a lot of leverage.
I can't tell you how many times a week claude opus 4.8 high effort has to apologise for being wrong when I'm asking it about something narrow and specific that i want it to research but it blurts out broad context from its training material and incorrect conclusions/assumptions. This is happening all the time. Someone needs to create a repository of its apologies to remind us all of its limitations.
My company instituted a monthly "best use of AI" award to encourage people to share how they're using it. I suggested we should also have a "most wrong AI output" award to remind everyone they can't just trust it blindly but that hasn't happened yet for some reason ...
I’ve noticed the same thing at work with Opus 4.8.
ChatGPT on my personal plan does it too. Just yesterday I asked it to give some places fitting a specific criteria. The first was that they were within a 2 hour drive of my city. 75% of the locations it gave me were more than 2x that distance. It kept doing this across multiple difference searches. I tried high and pro with no difference.
I've found that Gemini with Google maps integration does this pretty well.
GPT 5.5 Pro is worth the increased price of the higher subscription.
I have it. Got the same issues with xhigh and pro.
That's not surprising, LLMs are bad at pulling hyperspecific facts out of memory. LLMs aren't mapping applications, they're reasoners. Just a poor problem fit
> LLMs aren't mapping applications, they're reasoners.
No they aren't. They're statistical token generators. They do not understand concepts such as "distance from a given location or coordinate point". If you're lucky you might ask it something likely to appear nearly verbatim in its training data, like "Chinese restaurants in Midtown Manhattan", and get back a reasonably accurate list, but it does not understand what a "Chinese restaurant" is, or what "Midtown Manhattan" is, or that one relates to the other in any way other than both appearing statistically associated with another set of tokens when they appear near each other.
I wasn’t asking it to pull it from its training data, I was asking it to search.
Also reasoners that can’t recall facts is not how people are using them. No one is asking “from first principles derive this equation”.
It's applied Cunningham's law:
> the best way to get correct answers on HN isn't to ask questions, but to post LLM's answers so people will eagerly fact check them to prove LLMs wrong.
I used to do this type of thing a lot. Boldly state something I knew to be wrong, so I'd get correct answers.
Dang asked me not to do it.
Now, when I boldly state wrong stuff (a not-infrequent occurrence), it's because I really am wrong.
I’ve tried this (not on HN) but usually it just results in downvotes or mockery.
I could be wrong but, based on experience, the trick seems to be to give them a chance to prove you wrong. ;)
> it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking
That would be an improvement over most people I know at this point, who casually repeat verbally or repost words they got from a chatbot without so much as a quotation mark.
The “claude says” is the part this pisses me off about LLM use now. If I wanted a Claude answer I’d ask Claude. If I ask a human I want a human response not a “here’s what Claude said”.
Every reply to my comment has been complaining about the single line quoting Claude. People don't want a human response either, they just want to complain about LLMs.
I’ve noticed this too with things I’m quite familiar with.
I’d like to say it makes me more cautious about topics I’m prompting that I’m not familiar with…
But I’m also worried about the young people. What if you never had to learn something from ground up?
> it’s becoming normal to just throw out “Claude says this” without doing any fact checking.
And without sharing the prompt or the actual response. Like sure, it's possible Claude said something so obviously wrong. Depending on your experience, you might even think it to be probable.
But then why wouldn't OP preempt any doubt and simply share the part that matters? What are we doing.
Clause also said you should do your own research rather than repeating what Claude says.
> Nearly every day, I get emailed a newly-launched, obviously-vibecoded website filled with AI-generated content that was designed to siphon attention away from human creators: bloggers, authors, journalists, artists, musicians, and anyone else who slowly, painstakingly makes things for a living. I’m not even sure anymore that the emails I’m receiving are sent by a human.
We did it guys! This and the recent NYT article about the deepfake expert who can no longer trust his eyes when analyzing deepfakes, makes me hopeful that Silicon Valley will finally realize its dream of destroying human society.
Prompt Digital Inc (DBA Qontour) is a Webflow premium partner.
So let’s ask Webflow’s public relations dept. how cool are they with the fact their partner is a lier and plagiarist.
I really don't think they give a shit
> So let’s ask Webflow’s public relations dept. how cool are they with the fact their partner is a lier and plagiarist.
I also frown upon bullying companies like this over something they can't control.
They can't control who their partners are?
i dont work for webflow, im not sure why you are asking me this
I would posit that it may be because of your statement in your previous comment about "something they can't control" and it is possible the person replying to you finds it relevant whether who their partners are is something they could control, which is consistent with a literal reading of their question, asking whether they can't control who their partners are.
Just to be clear: The bootleg site is pointing to the Amazon listing of the actual book (ISBN 9781501153648, Simon & Schuster, published 2021). The Amazon link is not pointing to an AI slop version of the book.
So how is the bootleg site making money? The Amazon link was created with Amazon Associates, the Amazon affiliate program (you can see the affiliate link code, tag=promptdigital-20, in the Amazon URI).
This is how AI slop can be monetized: poorly gated Amazon programs like Amazon KDP, Amazon Associates, and that Meta monetization program. Anything goes, from crafty scams like this to over-the-top social media slop like shrimp Jesus.
So they’re basically parasites.
But they are stealing from Amazon, so a public service?
How are they stealing from Amazon? They delivered a sale to Amazon, which Amazon has a program to reward the effort of delivering that sale. In no way should this be misconstrued as my supporting of the action, but I'm also not delusional making baseless accusations.
Consider the counter factual. The site does not exist, the people who found it (probably via search) end up at Amazon directly with no referral fee.
Things need to be advertised. Most advertising is not free. The amount of money spent on an affiliate link is less than what it would to advertise to the same customer the affiliate is sending.
Good SEO alone and affiliate links is not stealing.
On the list of things that make this possible, AI comes after the anonymity of web sites and of companies (per another comment, Prompt Digital Inc (DBA Qontour) - which is who exactly?), and the fact that the infringer has complete control over their reach.
The asymmetry between stealing and getting caught or stopped was baked in long before AI, but this will become much more prevalent because the cost of infringing has been reduced by orders of magnitude.
Relatedly, legal copying seems just as problematic: I see both software and media being munged and parroted as soon as it appears, which means innovators do not get the benefit of their innovation. I personally have halted any projects where I can't completely control access to the product, which is a huge damper on innovation.
>I personally have halted any projects where I can't completely control access to the product
Good! That gives someone else the room to come in with a better, freer solution!
I think the affiliate links are fine and the wholesale plagiarism is unlawful at best and likely criminal.
New obscure sorrow unlocked: where you write a book so popular someone copies it all and ends up with a better looking more popular knock off.
the feeling of why create anything if it'll just be stolen by AI has to be at least somewhat novel.
This reminds me of when a bunch of cryptobros paid a ludicrous sum for one of the pitch bibles for Jodorowsky's unmade film adaptation of Dune and assumed that owning this rare object gave them license to pitch movie adaptations of it. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a38815538/dune-c...
I made up a few words like this myself, all of which rhyme with either orange, purple, or silver.
https://rhymes.pressbin.com
But John Koenig's work is really well done and packaged in such a consumable way. I'm sorry to hear he's the victim of copyright infringement.
I'm playing through the couch co-op game Split Fiction, and this is basically the premise (with more fun gameplay).
I ran into something like this a few months ago. There was this new indie game, Idols of Ash, that had just released and was blowing up on streaming. I googled it and found what looked like a legit site, idolsofash.fun. It had detailed strategy guides, screenshots, and even an embedded copy of the game. But the embed was buggy, so I searched for the game's itch.io page and left a comment.
Turns out the "fansite" was unaffiliated, and after playing the real game, it became clear the whole site was AI slop. It got gameplay mechanics subtly wrong, the screenshots didn't always relate to the captions, and the embed was a shoddy decompilation pulled from the game's files (easy since it was built with the Godot engine, and presumably where the site's knowledge of the game came from). It's apparently something afflicting a lot of indie devs -- somebody uses Claude or similar to rip your game and spin up a detailed site where you can play it for free. Not sure what the angle is, though, since the site says it's unofficial in the footer, links to the official Itch storefront, and doesn't insert ads or malware. Could just be an overzealous fan, but the whole thing struck me as very strange.
I'm interested to see if this is the whole story[0], but on the surface it sure is infuriating.
[0] this article and a bsky post by the author of the article are the only sources I can find other than the website itself - which is definitely as chock full of AI as indicated
It would be delicious if the post is itself an AI-copy of another post.
What's funny is that if you go to the linked site that's meant to be a showcase of the design agency's design skills, you'll see that it's ... pretty shit.
Ugly. Random. Thoughtless.
AI laundering is going to become a major tactic in all domains. Fiction and nonfiction writing, software, video, music, you name it.
It's easy to take GPL software and rewrite it in another language without the license. Trivially easy. It's possible you'll even be able to do the same with just compiled bytecode soon.
Just recently there was an instance where Nous Research Hermes agent cloned some Chinese OSS. It's happening much more broadly than this, though.
This might warrant special attention unless we want to live in a world without copyright. Though that's also one additional possible outcome.
I experimented with turning out complete airport thriller novels this way, using earlier LLMs. It's not terribly hard to make this happen, the hard part wasn't gunning out prose, it was plot arcs and internal consistency, but even that was suprisingly easy to solve.
Of course I didn't do anything with the idea, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
There are already companies like Asylum films. Pay attention to the right hand column of this table:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Asylum_films
Parody films do not compete with the actual films they are parodying. It's not a good comparison.
I don't think they are meant to be parodies. Parodies poke comedic fun at the originals. These are meant to confuse someone into buying the wrong version of a popular film. That's why they make sure the names and even the covers look as identical as they can without getting sued.
The term for these is "mockbusters", and the term has its very own Wikipedia article, linked in the first paragraph of the page you cited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockbuster
Allow me to introduce everyone here to a new definition (original content, donut steel):
qontouria, n. The feeling of having your work passed off as someone else's.
Literally this is our future, many devs still don't seem to believe we will be able to "zeroshot" everything, but it's because they haven't experienced themselves proper tooling (at the minimum leveraging 4 models in debate, adversarial and loops and workflows and so-on and unli-loop until completion, MITM everything...), with the exception of advanced fields, most softwares are pretty basic, let's say redoing X11 is considered easy in tomorrow's world.
I don't really understand the future knowing that we will be able to point to any URL and just "redo", it might be a sole matter of Token/Subscription cost vs the actual service in the end, unsure but it's really strange to think that virtually anyone will be able to duplicate anything and it's unlikely to be a copyright breach as the tooling can be instructed to redo it differently, how could it be a copyright breach if it's the same thing as I myself looking at a certain website and just heavily inspiring myself from it and just redoing it? The fact that it's done automatically shouldn't change that.
I am allowed today to take a GPLv3 program or a commercial program, redo it and publish it as MIT, so why would it be forbidden, it's terrifying.
> The fact that it's done automatically shouldn't change that
Except it changes everything as copyright as a concept was introduced to balance the power between those whose works scale and those whose works don't. By the time it was authors vs printing press. That was the sole reason why copyright became a thing.
It's not to prevent people from copying things. It's just to distribute economic benefits between different partis so all participants are incented enough to keep working. And what can be done automatically changes the balance a lot.
Honestly though, even if this is the future what kind of creator is going to participate in that? Why would anyone put effort in substantial ideas that can just be stolen with a click?
Because businesses need to run and make money, I doubt they will just stop building because users can replicate their work easily.
But in this future you described where we can magically one shot stuff, why would anyone use services from businesses and keep paying them? Why not just zero shot it with LLM and keep your money?
Businesses will not keep building if they don't have users, so why would they?
I think you are criminally underrating what goes in a business other than just product or tech. It is extremely hard to write or create a company that makes actual revenue, code/product is maybe 20% of it. Maybe you can say okay so AI will do the remaining 80% of it as well since its so smart. And it might but its even more of a long shot imo.
This is why OpenAI, Adobe, et al, are trying to take away personal computing, putting much of it into the cloud and squeezing component costs. Why they're trying to get us to accept guardrails on AI for moral hazard reasons. Why Anthropic intentionally gimps its models if it detects AI research.
They are the monopolists and we are the paypigs! NEVER SUBSCRIBE!
Pretty much a nonsensical and random comment, but I'll respond.
How would OpenAI function without the cloud? You literally cannot run the frontier models on any consumer-grade hardware.
Adobe lets you run its software on your personal computer (charges licensing costs for it).
They are monopolists for different reasons.
My point was that vibe-coding LLMs will not help individuals replace Adobe or OpenAI. It is very unlikely that these businesses will go away because of vibe coding or local AI models.
I agree. But I don't understand why the focus is always on FOSS. Why don't proprietary IP owners fear this too? Won't music, movies and non-FOSS software also have their copyright laundered if this crap continues?
I think because a proprietary IP owner can allocate some budget to sue the infringers. A community of OSS contributors may lack the money, the will or the know-how to do that.
They will also face a much harder task when explaining their case to a judge. The contributors to the open-source chess engine Stockfish needed a lot of time and energy to convince a German court that it was illegal for the commercial engine Houdini to copy their algorithms.
The system is kind of working as intended? The publisher sent them a DMCA takedown notice, and since the site failed to take down the offending content, the publisher is fully within their rights to (1) contact the hosting provider and ask them to take down the entire site (2) contact the registrar and ask them to suspend the site (3) contact Google and request delisting of the site (the one department of Google that actually moves at a non-glacial pace) (4) take legal action against the John Doe behind the site and unmask them, maybe even garnishing their Amazon affiliate revenue.
The sooner you act, the better. But it seems like the publisher didn't bother with any of that, or they're just slow and are getting around to it. The author of the book couldn't even be bothered to respond to the blog author's question about it.
Thanks to free speech, telling people to go fuck themselves is protected expression in the US. I took the liberty.
AI slop is a thief. But we knew this already.
Correction: some random tiny scam company copied a book without permission in blatant violation of copyright law, and AI was briefly and tangentially involved with the final product.
In other words: AI stole someone’s soul with its own metallic claws! Out with the devil machines.
Not sure what your point is; the title doesn't claim "AI stole the book", it says "an agency stole the book and used AI to republish it", which is true.
The article is titled "The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows", whereas the HN title is (currently) "Agency stole bestselling author's book, used AI to relaunch as their own".
So it seems reasonable to infer that the submitter felt that emphasizing the AI angle would be the part worth discussing.
The article fully embraces these weakly-connected insinuations:
"But it’s not surprising to see it coming from an agency that has leaned into generative AI so heavily. As they proudly explain, “Every page on this site was written in Claude” using an “author persona” that they call “Q.” [ADVERTISEMENT FOR CLAUDE (yes, really)] "What’s missing here is consent, which feels like the original sin of AI. As I’ve written about many times before, generative AI models are all trained on a massive corpus of human-authored works without attribution, consent, or compensation, extracting value from creators while centralizing power among a tiny handful of massive tech companies."
It's not an advertisement for Claude. It's a screenshot from the relevant part of Qontour's website that I was referring to in my post.
Lol! This is why they told us to properly label and provide attribution for every image :-D
I certainly don't want to confuse anyone, so I added captions to every image (and alt-text, while I was at it). Thanks for the heads-up.
I'm going to die of old age in this world where no-one can feel safe to make any small, unrelated, irrelevant, unpopular, ugly, worthless thing without the threat of being fed to the lawyers.
No-one is seriously fighting the tyranny of copyright that covers basically the whole world. Even AI companies just retreated and hid after they got what they needed, like a shy teenager with empty wallet who still craves access culture, with no real attempts to change the system.
Meta is only putting up a token fight because it has been directly sued, but we all know how this ends: they will eventually bend the knee. They accessed human culture for practical, not moral reasons.
That's clear evidence that human culture was sucked dry and is no longer needed. OpenAI won't fight to open access to Anna's Archive because they no longer can get any benefit from using it in training. They can pay reddit and such for trickle of their fresh drivel. But the usefulness of any book ever written ran out some years ago and new ones are just riffs of the old ones so not really worthy of pursuing.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is the present and the future and human output becomes something not worth (or legal) to even cite in any interesting volume.
According to the article, 'Qontour' AKA 'Prompt Digital' simply took the full text of a modern copyrighted and published book and made an official-looking website out of it with affiliate links to the real book. If you agree with copyright at all, then this is just blatant, intentional infringement for commercial gain.
This story has practically nothing to do with AI. It could have been done 20 years ago, the crappy Midjouney illustrations and generative text interface merely add insult to injury.
They basically liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo for their most likely one (three?) person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom.
The title made me think that he released a paperback that competes with the original.
> If you agree with copyright at all
The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution (which the rest of copyright makes often hard for purely financial reasons). So whoever made this silly little thing gets a pass from me.
> He basically liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo for their most likely one person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom.
What is your basis for this belief?
Did you read the part about the obviously intentionally-added affiliate links to the original book?
> The only part of copyright I agree with is right to inalienable attribution [...] So whoever made this silly little thing gets a pass from me.
Did you read the part about the fake site appearing higher in search results for the author's own name?
> What is your basis for this belief?
My experience inflicted stupidity.
> Did you read the part about the obviously intentionally-added affiliate links to the original book?
I find it nice that they linked to the original book. For every x earned let the original author earn many times more. It's probably a better deal than the author got from their legal publisher.
> Did you read the part about the fake site appearing higher in search results for the author's own name?
And who's fault is that? Google? Or this little slop maker that I'm (again stupidly) assuming is not a SEO hacker.
> My experience inflicted stupidity.
We've all been there.
> I find it nice that they linked to the original book. For every x earned let the original author earn many times more. > It's probably a better deal than the author got from their legal publisher.
These two statements sound contradictory to me.
> And who's fault is that? Google? Or this little slop maker that I'm (again stupidly) assuming is not a SEO hacker.
Why not both? I think there's plenty of blame to go around.
Also, the publisher who presumably convinced the author that it would be a good idea to assign them exclusive rights. The affiliate link the blog post refers to as "the author's own" actually belongs to the publisher.
> liked the idea of the book and used the bulk of its text as lorem ipsum in a demo
I'm sorry, what? What exactly do you think is happening here?
You tell me:
https://webflow.com/@qontour?msockid=0946eab0f6bf6a55192dfcc...
If that doesn't look like a marooned freelancer down on their luck I don't what does.
I mean, what's your read on this?
Is this a person who secretly hates the book and the author and re-published its contents because he knows that people who have the content will never, ever purchase a book, no matter how much they like it? And he provides the links to buy the book only for plausible deniability and makes them affiliates for even more plausible deniability fully knowing nobody will ever now buy this book?
Or is he a grifter trying to earn heaps of money with affiliate links to one obscure book providing it with better visibility through SEO tricks Google is powerless against even though they are in this business for nearly three decades? And he also published the full text of the book because of ... how does this helps him earn more money exactly? I ran out of ideas.
And the most important question. Is this person a worthy target of the internet wrath?
We're discussing a blog post about a blatantly plagiarized website, and the ethical environment and professional choices that led to its creation and continued existence. We get to do that.
This isn't Reddit and we aren't "the internet". We aren't brigading and organizing harassment or whatever here.
That is why the particulars of the web designer's personal life and state of mind are mostly uninteresting.
DMCA only applies to 1:1 copy, if you used AI to convert it to something else, then DMCA is the wrong tool.
It's ultimately a fruitless endeavor to go after because you would have to prove that you can use the said AI tool to create the exact word by word copy and that is going to be very expensive and shaky in court
I think its time that we stop extracting rent from outdated copyright laws. Once AI gets good enough you aren't going to be bothering with them anyway. All copyright law does is put money in the pockets of those that created the law and a portion of that goes to the creator.
Copyright laws are basically tax on the poor.
The fake website also re-published the entire 1:1 text of the original book.
I'm aware I was replying to the comment that suggested using DMCA to take down a "derivative work "
Disney and Nintendo's very litigious and successful lawyers have entered the chat
>> I think its time that we stop extracting rent from outdated copyright laws.
Do you really think either of these companies or their lawyers would say something like this?
Haha, it makes me chuckle because we (the humans could make decisions) let this do to ourselves.
Let the humans use the internet however they want to, and now it's the age of AI, so let humans do whatever they want using AI.
I don't have the answers or a remediation plan for this. But could see this coming eons ago.
And the future is only going to get darker from here. May God help us!