Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
So, people are semi defenceless when these things come up, and you can really abuse people in pretty epic and unending ways
This is not just self interest. There really are a lot of hidden traps. Words almost never mean what you think they mean. If they have a lawyer and you don't, you are taking a serious risk.
i.e. even where it isn't opaque, it is surprising how many people mess up.
(Of course that includes lawyers)
I guess you'd have to at least suspect the letter was fake to try that, so you might miss it if that's not even on your radar.
I would never live in a country (guess US) where you need a kidney to defend yourself even if you did nothing wrong.
If they are serious, they will follow it up - and you will eventually have to show up in court.
For individuals you have a point, but for small and medium companies this seems like an exaggeration.
I've worked for several startups. The smallest was one that I co-founded with no outside funding - we maxed out at five employees, three of whom were co-founders, but nevertheless we registered and successfully defended trademarks and copyrights. That business ran until its main product became obsolete, for about 5 years.
The funded startups I've worked for all used the legal system around IP in various ways: trademarks, patents, copyright.
One of these bogus DMCA claims would be easily and cheaply dismissed by any competent lawyer. And really, probably doesn't even require a lawyer unless a hosting company acts on it and doesn't listen to any objections.
If you're a new small business owner how do you vet lawyers for competency? If you accidentally engage a less then competent lawyer who screws up, how does that impact the individual and company?
People often ask me for recommendations of a lawyer outside my field, or indeed in my field if I can't help them because my firm is conflicted or for some other reason. The thing is I don't personally use lawyers, so I have only the vaguest idea. I can tell some things from firms' reputations and their websites, but even for me it is a hard call.
And the law firms I have most experience of in practice tend to be the ones which I would go out of my way to disrecommend :-).
So I agree, that is a problem. Particularly for litigation. Unless you are doing litigation a lot - which is likely to be bad news for you - you can't get experience of a lawyer and decide that you like them. Word of mouth is also rather less useful.
And there's always reputations and word of mouth but I find that to actually be more or less on point when it comes to particular niches, like if you need someone who spoke a particular language or dialect, or someone who understood how to cross examine about technology and not have the jury fall asleep on you, or someone who can handle a child witness and someone who can't. It's not that different in the civil context, is it? There was even a prosecutor who was widely known to be susceptible to running himself into Batson challenges and sure enough the first trial I had against him he managed to dismiss every minority in the pool leaving me and the client the only two in the room which was glaring since the jurors began noticing that something was before we even got there. It was moot since we got a mistrial but if the opposing side is known to be generous with free issues to preserve for appeal you'd be on the lookout, wouldn't you? Or am I still overestimating how often civil attorneys end up in front of a jury broadly?
You do meet opponents, but in some fields, not often enough to really know.
In crime, your client would be in the cells much of the time and you could sit at the back of the court and watch lots of counsel do a good or bad job.
Of course even the civil bar do get to know each other in the way that commercial transactional lawyers - which is what I do now - don't have as much opportunity to do. I am typically dealing with commercial organizations all over the world. Too many lawyers to get to know.
The best way, generally, is to survey other lawyers in the same field and jurisdiction and cross-reference to see if a firm or solo practitioner gets more recognition from their peers independently, btw. It's how lawyers find representation in fields they have no familiarity with. The jingles at best are entirely irrelevant and may even be an indicator that the firm relies on volume more than it really should.
edit: should mention that this generally applies for criminal or administrative cases. The civil arena is far too big and varied for me to suggest a heuristic that can be generalized since it concerns so much work that is wildly different and also, comparatively few court appearances (although I'd likely use the same method, but starting with my classmates, if I need to hire someone for a civil matter, if I have a classmate who practices in the field and in my jurisdiction).
I made friends with a few local lawyers, explained the situation and asked them to send a response on their letterhead or via email telling them in proper legal language to 'fuck off' (usually they'd mention it was outside statute of limitations and the use was never willful infringement or it was user contributed and we were only hosting the content). There was never a situation where they didn't leave us alone after that. I guess they assume real small companies will either panic and pay to settle or ignore legal summons and lose by default?
I refer m'learned friend to the precedent of Arkell v Pressdram
Theoretically it is every individual’s responsibility to know and comply with the law.
A lot of this stuff is routine and doesn’t need a superstar. A general counsel can typically recommend specialists if you need them.
I get to choose the best and most expensive lawyers and tell them to bill however many hours they like, because that asshole I'm suing is going to have to pay for it?
Or I want to keep costs down, but the other guy has hired a team of three $500-an-hour lawyers to bury me in paperwork? And the only way I can avoid losing and having to pay is to respond in kind?
Sounds like a recipe for deep-pocked corporations like Disney to win every legal action.
It certainly seems appropriate that something like copyright litigation, which has statutory "civil" penalties in excess of the GDP of a medium-sized country, demands the judiciary branch extend some due process (including Gideon) to the unincorporated defendant.
Patents need more money, but all the externally funded startups I’ve worked at had the money for that - investors consider them important.
a large company can absolutely drain your small/medium business with frivolous lawsuits.
the point is that Western judicial system largely caters to capital not justice.
The problem is that there is no way to make it 'fair'. All the proposed reforms are also incredibly unfair, just in a slightly different way from what we have.
For example, if you remove the power of precedent suddenly knowing and being able to search case law becomes unimportant, giving laymen a huge step up in defending themselves. However it also makes the legal system far more inconsistent across judgements.
Instead laws are poorly written meaning case law becomes the actual law
You tell me how to fix it.
And I'll tell you how a bad actor will abuse your fix.
Of course there are tens of other small improvements that could bring improvements, starting from simplifications of the legal code to small claims courts that would be allowed to punish minor offenses by corporations that are repeated on a systemic scale.
What are the abuses that you see, and most of all, do you think those abuses would be worse that the current abuses?
This also means that the smaller players wood get drained out if they try to abuse the system.
Another thing is that the CEO wild be forced to attend, or have very high costs to not be there. This is too ensure that me, as an individual, have much more to loose personally (and can be exhausted) in front of a corporation who has leaders wise job is to be at the court.
I did not put a lot of thoughts on the ideas, but the basic one is too make everyone suffer the same relatively.
This is partly sourced from Finland roads, where you pay in function of your wealth when you cross the law
Some of the system being like that probably comes partly from the founding idea of "a government of laws and not of men" and the US constitution.
You don't actually need a lawyer to respond to bogus charges. Legal trolls make their money assuming most people settle or don't show up. Just submit your evidence, show up in court, and if it is bogus, it will be clear.
Small claims court is a completely different beast, it is designed to be navigated without counsel.
If you play this way in civil litigation you are likely going to lose before you know what hit you.
Why? Search brings up lots of them.
I once used a process server service called "Attila the Hun School of Charm". They are gone, but there's a "Gotcha Process Servers" in San Francisco.
I see a letter like this, I’ll wait for them to file an injunction.
A fake DMCA claim is fraud or at least perjury, but trying to actually bring a claim for that will be difficult for most people.
As an owner of a website with a lot of content published over the years, a copyright claim pops up with "settlement" offers between $200-$1k to make it go away.
50% of the time it's an outright scam like this.
45% it's legit, we pay the settlement, and a writer gets a reminder about citing images and copyright.
5% is the worst, where a photographer will have a open license like CC BY-NC, then a law firm will contact photographers with images licensed like that, and partner with them to send demand letters to businesses improperly using the open license and do the settlement shakedown. While technically in violation because we're a business with ad revenue, it's nefarious because it's exploiting nuances of open licenses and writers on schedule missing the NC part of the license review. We get it right most of the time, but mistakes happen. Feels dirty to leverage CC to make money doing copyright shakedowns.
It's like arguing that punitive fines for minor infractions, like jaywalking or speeding, would be justified because "you broke the law".
The outrageous maximum penalties ($100k/infringement), the nuance of fair use and copyright law, and the resulting cost of defending yourself means that the only solution if you don't have excellent in-house counsel is you have to settle for what they ask. It's legal extortion.
I think we're in agreement that the current copyright system is a joke. It's too complicated and there's too many loopholes that can be exploited.
I thought we were talking about companies. Why should the owner of the work care about whether your writer was on too tight of a timeline to properly check whether they were allowed to use the photographer's work for free? Yes, a company stealing people's work is abusive, and I am not sure why we should be sympathetic when some small % of them happen to have aggressive representation.
Doesn't even have to be -NC. Creative Commons licenses require reusers to provide comprehensive[1] attribution when they reuse images. Some older versions of the license, like 2.0, also terminated immediately and permanently upon any breach of the license; copyright trolls have abused this to sue reusers who forgot to include some part of the required attribution. CC 4.0 provides the reuser a 30-day grace period to cure a violation.
[1]: "the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material", as well as the title of the work prior to 4.0 -- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en#ref-appr...
And we do our best to comply with the letter of all the different open licenses, but it's hard as a small pub with a writing staff.
A good way to look at it is like a newspaper. Using an image related to the content of an article is editorial, the primary purpose is to educate, entertain or inform. This is true even if for a newspaper that charges money. But using an image in an ad, in a way that endorses a product or creates a relationship or advertises a product is commercial use.
Which is why this scam is so profitable.
I'm afraid this is might be a fake conference created by AI. Am I crazy? I paid $500 for tickets. I almost signed up for the booth.
I'll have to start emailing speakers for confirmation because it's not passing the smell test.
30,000 attendees for a conference is MASSIVE. Like a GDC or SEMA or something. One of the biggest in the world. Unless it's happened before, then I have a hard time believing they just spun this up out of nowhere.
Edit: Would also have more sponsors. 2k to sponsor that/get a booth is WAAAAAY to cheap.
Edit2: Also one of the sessions is. "... text2video, text2audio, text2multimodal, text2richcontent" Sounds like a ChatGPT thing. Wild that they used, like you said, Ai, to generate an AI conference and genAI. Very meta
You could try emailing them (aiotlabs@microsoft.com, from their website) and asking whether they're really sponsoring that conference.
It may be real?
Edit: down below it says this theater will Host a conference of 30k people. No it won't. This is a scam.
Even if it is the whole hall (which used to be the Exploratorium, back in the day), there's still no way in hell they'd get 30,000 people inside. According to https://palaceoffinearts.com/info/, the maximum capacity of the facility is 5,000, and even that would be very crowded.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that would be physically impossible, unless they are planning on hosting most of the conference on the grounds, parking lot and maybe surrounding streets.
This is not the case -- The Palace of Fine Arts is an excellent conference location - expansive and with mezz levels for private presentations, etc. I've done several conferences there and also presented.
It has beautiful outdoor garden spaces for relaxed 1:1s and doesnt feel at all like SF as most people imagine.
It looked interesting at first. But when I started to research more I didn't find any buzz.
I reported the event to eventbrite
Good luck with the charge-back. I'm sure your bank will eventually be accommodating after you explain what happened and jump through enough hoops.
[1] https://sv2023.genaisummit.ai/
EDIT: I found these photos, but don't have a linkedin, so I can't verify anything about the presenter:
https://images.app.goo.gl/UaVfRUAU8YnQrmek6
https://images.app.goo.gl/yszbyq8fhEvoHcfi6
https://images.app.goo.gl/1ybWTJ4wPhuHt5R16
EDIT 2: It seems to be this person, who appears to have worked at microsoft last year : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMSu0gmlD3w
Maybe it is fine after all?
(and it would be "created with" at best, it's people who do things)
I want a list of everyone who worked on that manifesto so I can put them on a list of "people to never interact with at any cost."
The second biggest, Sequoia, was all in on FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried right up until the collapse.
> [Sequoia partner Michelle] Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’” That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.” Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner. “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another. “YES!!!” exclaimed a third. What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. “I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.” “We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”
There's plenty of other stuff in there. It's not just pumping up a promising bet that went bad, it's hagiography on a scale that is almost impossible to believe, approved by an organization that is really supposed to know better.
FTFY :)
lot of voices in washington to make an example out of him. not sure if he's aware
> In this case, though, the email didn’t demand that the photo be taken down or specifically threaten a lawsuit. Instead, it demanded that Smith place a “visible and clickable link” beneath the photo in question to a website called “tech4gods” or the law firm would “take action.”
By mandating with “legal threat” that they link to a particular website, that website will rank higher.
Seriously the fact that copyright violation has 10s of thousands if not millions in penalties, but fraudulent copyright claims don’t even cover legal costs is so gross.
It’s right up there with “it’s a crime for you to create derivative work, but not for a VC funded ‘AI’ company to”
if your work is not generating $$$ its probably not worth anything to sue over
all these artists are rightfully upset that Stability is making money off them by scraping their copyrighted content from Deviant Art or Tumblr
but without significant revenues, you are at the mercy of eager class action attorneys who will take most of the winnings and are just as quick to settle for a 99% probability of cashing out.
so it is a "crime" like it would be if you would run gameboy ROMs on emulator.js and sell advertisement. It won't even register on the politicians minds.
Hollywood studio finding their work used to train LLMs? Well you saw how eager biden was taking down Megaupload.
Money talks and your content if its not owned by a large studio and not raking in significant tax revenues, its probably worthless in the minds of the judge/jury/politicians
Companies routinely sue people for distributing products they literally no longer sell, it does not matter. In the same way that when someone steals your tv, they don’t get to just return or pay for the TV if they’re caught.
If an AI company is consuming your work, it definitionally has value, and they have no more right to it than you have to any of their property.
Now if one of these companies is happy to let you take, use, and/or charge for their services without paying them then I’d wouldn’t consider them hypocritical thieves, but they don’t, so I don’t.
It like all the “AI” trained on OSS software. That has value to you, literally the entire look t of licenses like the GPL is that that software has value, and you are in no way giving it away for free, and the license explicitly requires compensation.
https://generated.photos/faces/right-facing/adult/black-race...
If the authorities decide to go after whoever did it, that could go pretty badly for the guilty party.
sigh Words mean nothing. Headlines are just a set of keywords the content marketers want in there.
Yes, the relentless drumbeat of 'this is the next Internet' hype. With blockchain it was 'money of the future'. Both are things that pique popular interest, but both fail to deliver what the hype promises. What people want is AGI, what they get are LLMs.
I don't know about that. What I want is a local, private, configurable LLM that will act as my agent for actions that can be automated (e.g., ordering groceries based on what's in my refrigerator or paying my bills or noting that my favorite band will be in my town sometime in the future and buying tickets for me or filing my taxes for me or any of thousands of other things) without sharing state or data with anyone.
I don't really care about AGI, as it doesn't currently and won't exist for the foreseeable future. And AGI is likely sentient and, as such, should have a choice as to how it expends the CPU/memory/network it is allocated.
Perhaps I'm not representative of the "people" you mention, but that's what I want.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Naturally, the individuals which are attracted to such an idea tend to… not be the most… prosocial or empathetic bunch. And some fraction of those take that to the degree of engaging in actively predatory and abusive behaviors in order to amass their own wealth.
The hype cycle, and other prevailing economic conditions, are definitely a part of it too. But frankly, you don't see quite so many scams with other widely hyped technologies.
We have had web search for 25 years, it could surface any content out of billions of web pages. It's faster than LLMs and the content is written by humans. Why mention AI and crypto and not web search, it empowers people to make derivative works or to use information without compensation, isn't that a form of predation?
Add Wikipedia too, it officially discourages any "original research", everything is derived, and most people just read the wiki without ever clicking on the references to the original contents. Wiki takes traffic away from those sources, can we say it is a grifter site?
Alternatively, let's tone down the grifting logic. There is nothing LLMs know that search engines and wiki don't, they just save a determined person a couple of clicks and a bit of reading.
The requirement of money as the core instrument of survival should be abolished.
If people aren't raised thinking money is everything, maybe society as a whole will gradually chill out on scamming the f outta each other.
They probably have potential to create value (maybe more than crypto?), but if the core feature is to emulate a human you can see that many uses would be malicious.