The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#6

Post by shevy-java » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

AI slop is a thief. But we knew this already.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#7

Post by fwipsy » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

lambdaone wrote: post #4

This is exactly what DMCA takedowns are actually for.

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?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#8

Post by shevy-java » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

lambdaone wrote: post #4

This is exactly what DMCA takedowns are actually for.

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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#9

Post by egypturnash » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

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...

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#10

Post by fwipsy » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

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.