The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
waxy.org
waxy.org
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.
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.
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)
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!?
Child death penalties probably aren't something that you actually want, right? You NEED them. Nothing gets people to take a step back like capital punishment for misdemeanor crimes. And with great power comes great responsibility.
However, I get where you're coming from. A thought: Speeding is a pretty tiny crime but it needs to be punishable by the death penalty on the first offense. We'd never have to worry about that criminal driving dangerously again. It actually stones 2 birds with 1 kill. That speeder might actually be a serial speeder. Serial offenders sometimes escalate their crimes over time and they never, ever stop until they're not just dead, but also decapitated. The serial speeder that drove 5 over yesterday might drive 7 over today. Tomorrow may even get all the way to 8 over the limit. Eventually they'll get to ramming speed. After a serial speeder gets to ramming speed, they will never accept a slower speed; they will ram other cars and die first. This would have been prevented by simply taking advantage of the power of 1st offense: death penalty.
For both time efficiency purposes and the perception it would bring, judges should be walking around with 2 fully automatic assault rifles tucked under their robes. They already line up before the verdict is read, then dump both mags as soon as the jury says "guilty."
There's an overly lax legal system and no signs of a "Death Row Children's Fun Zone". The reality of that approach is that kids have the freedom ( and enough tokens) for basic white collar crimes. If enough of that happens, money will get canceled forever. Then by the time next Tuesday comes around we'll wake up on an Earth with everything regressed all the way back to a pure barter economy. This is why we can't have nice things.
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.
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.
It's just that people have taken different routes historically.
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.
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
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.
Can you decide, whether you are OK with unfit comparisons or not, instead of trying to have it both ways?
Let me make a music comparison. If Metallica or Michael Jackson uploaded all their raw recording tracks to Napster and The Pirate Bay. The DAW files, or the separate instrument and voice tapes. Do they have a right to then get mad if people use those files to make remixes and edits?
There is a way to give away your software for free without any risk of people stealing your work: Just give the compiled binaries.
If you upload your source code to a public website explicitly created for source code sharing, which even has a one button press to copy the source code, then you have no right to be mad that somebody copied your source code. You then did everything in your might to facilitate that behaviour.
Okay, not everything. I guess FOSS people could also start hacking in to other people's computers and install their software there, so that they can turn around and be outraged that their code was stolen. That's probably the next step being prepared in the FOSS swamp right now.
Counterpoint: Yes, it is. Both are copyrighted under the same legal system.
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
Which is the same as some very popular software, including the Safari browser, Android, and much more. That's FOSS, if you give it away you have to expect people to take it. Just as you say.
I guess it was sort of a "fan art" way, which isn't too bad, but they showed pretty callous disregard for the niceties of copyright, which is pretty important, for the type of work they are advertising.
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.
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.
(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.)
AI is not involved in the actual copyrighted content at all.
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.
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.
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.
I guess DMCA takedowns are only for the big fish fighting the good fight against car pirates.
Eg https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/06/16/congress/me...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are the monopolists and we are the paypigs! NEVER SUBSCRIBE!
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.
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.
qontouria, n. The feeling of having your work passed off as someone else's.
Of course I didn't do anything with the idea, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
> 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.
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.
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.
Also reasoners that can’t recall facts is not how people are using them. No one is asking “from first principles derive this equation”.
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.
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’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?
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.
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.
So let’s ask Webflow’s public relations dept. how cool are they with the fact their partner is a lier and plagiarist.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Good! That gives someone else the room to come in with a better, freer solution!
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.
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.
[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
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.
Ugly. Random. Thoughtless.
In other words: AI stole someone’s soul with its own metallic claws! Out with the devil machines.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
How so?
All numbers made up. I don't have any idea what they might actually be. I'm just presenting my logic with an example, in service of hopefully better understanding.
I'm sorry, what? What exactly do you think is happening here?
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?
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.
We get to discuss anything that doesn't get moderated.
> This isn't Reddit and we aren't "the internet".
It's a reddit for techno snobs and we are the internet as much as any other part of the internet.
> That is why the particulars of the web designer's personal life and state of mind are mostly uninteresting.
Depends on the perspective. IP law and it's fake aspirations for a morality that's voluntarily mob supported by a small but very vocal group of people is what's interesting for me. And who's being ground by it also kind of matters more than what imagined offences agains the letter of the "law" they commited to trigger that.
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!
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.
Do you really think either of these companies or their lawyers would say something like this?