Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 140 posts

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#81

Post by jimz »

tmpz22 wrote: post #36
antonvs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely inaccessible and non-existent to individuals or small companies. Even to medium companies. Only mega corps and law firms can afford to use the legal system. 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 wer…

> One of these bogus DMCA claims would be easily and cheaply dismissed by any competent lawyer. 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?

Only lawyers really know how to vet lawyers for competency, I've found. More people use the quality of the jingle as a guide than any useful way to discern competence, partly because people broadly fail to understand what a lawyer is supposed to do (and this differs depending on context, civil proceedings and criminal proceedings and administrative proceedings concern sometimes vastly disparate interests and in turn, responsibilities and expected outcomes).

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).

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#82

Post by dudus »

nickff wrote: post #23
dudus wrote: post #6

I just signed up for this genAI summit but the lack of social buzz and the profile of the organizers give me a strange feeling. https://genaisummit.ai/#/ 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.

Why did you sign up for a conference if you’re so uncertain as to its credibility and content? Is this an employer-sponsored outing?

I thought it was cheap. It said last tickets. I don't know ... that was stupid.

It looked interesting at first. But when I started to research more I didn't find any buzz.

I reported the event to eventbrite

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#83

Post by banana_feather »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #44
gentleman11 wrote: post #2

The root problem is that the legal system is completely inaccessible and non-existent to individuals or small companies. Even to medium companies. Only mega corps and law firms can afford to use the legal system. Even big tech often avoids it because of the expense, but if they do use it, they’re going to win, 99.9% of the time because of their war chests So, people are semi defenceless when these things come up, and…

I've sued several businesses and individuals in small claims court (in California) including two multinationals on the S&P 500. I have no formal legal training, only what every open source dev learns through licensing. The court bureaucracy was about as hard for me to learn than learning how to convert an out of state drivers license to my new state. Finding a process server was the hardest part. You write your accou…

> You don't actually need a lawyer to respond to bogus charges.

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.

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#84

Post by joecool1029 »

tmpz22 wrote: post #36
antonvs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely inaccessible and non-existent to individuals or small companies. Even to medium companies. Only mega corps and law firms can afford to use the legal system. 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 wer…

> One of these bogus DMCA claims would be easily and cheaply dismissed by any competent lawyer. 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?

I've received takedown claims and requests to settle before from some trolls (once by Getty but I didn't handle that one directly). Usually it was old contributed blog posts with an improperly cited image or site theme components we purchased that contained stuff that wasn't properly licensed. We'd take it down and then onto the next step...

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?

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#85

Post by jimz »

francisdavey wrote: post #79
tmpz22 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of these bogus DMCA claims would be easily and cheaply dismissed by any competent lawyer. 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?

Working out whether a lawyer is good, and more specifically good for what you want, is difficult even for another lawyer. 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…

It's funny that the dynamic seems to be entirely reversed in criminal or collaterally-related-to-criminal matters since I could have told you by the time I graduated (and had been practicing on a limited license for a year) which attorney is more competent at what specific aspect of defense related work, and when I jumped to federal CJA work and then removals which is administrative entirely, it also took very little time to suss out the quality of not only other attorneys working on the defense side but the prosecutors and their proclivities, strengths, and weaknesses. In fact I think I'd be a pretty bad attorney in my field if I didn't pick up these things pretty quickly, and the question of recommendations only happen when there may be a conflict anyway, usually because it's pretty normal for a case to have more than one defendant. The biggest case I worked on had 68 and everybody ended up pleading but even with that, I feel like just seeing how different attorneys tackled the same basic case but from a slightly different angle gave a decent amount of insight, including how quickly they are able to get a plea worked out and how they approached collateral issues that always comes out of massive fishing expeditions. I mean, it's a service industry gig with a fancy title in the end and since law school didn't teach anything about lawyering - even legal writing didn't actually cover any client management and actual courtroom procedure, although the 2 weeks we spent on what was essentially a doxxing exercise was really helpful combined with some programming skills - it feels inevitable that through exposure on a daily basis one would get a feel pretty quick of others in your field.

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?

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#86

Post by olliej »

spxneo wrote: post #59
olliej wrote: post #37

Another day another abuse built into the core of the DMCA. 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”

here's the thing and i had my share of arguments on twitter around this 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…

The penalty for IP theft is monetary, and the monetary penalties are independent on whether it creates value.

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.

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#87

Post by [deleted] »

bjterry wrote: post #73
duskwuff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The event link makes it look like it's just referring to the theater. It even mentions a "door time". 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.

> there's still no way in hell they'd get 30,000 people inside 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.

[deleted]

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#88

Post by bartonfink »

banana_feather wrote: post #83
Cheer2171 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've sued several businesses and individuals in small claims court (in California) including two multinationals on the S&P 500. I have no formal legal training, only what every open source dev learns through licensing. The court bureaucracy was about as hard for me to learn than learning how to convert an out of state drivers license to my new state. Finding a process server was the hardest part. You write your accou…

> You don't actually need a lawyer to respond to bogus charges. 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.

GP did the legal equivalent of pasting a bunch of shit from stack overflow and claiming they're a talented software engineer.

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#89

Post by david_shi »

gentleman11 wrote: post #2

The root problem is that the legal system is completely inaccessible and non-existent to individuals or small companies. Even to medium companies. Only mega corps and law firms can afford to use the legal system. Even big tech often avoids it because of the expense, but if they do use it, they’re going to win, 99.9% of the time because of their war chests So, people are semi defenceless when these things come up, and…

Agreed. Increasing the predictability and transparency of these systems is crucial for a functional society

Re: Fake AI law firms are sending fake DMCA threats to generate fake SEO gains

#90

Post by duskwuff »

celestialcheese wrote: post #74

This is so common, and has been for a number of years. 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 op…

> 5% is the worst, where a photographer will have a open license like CC BY-NC

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...

Post reply on HN