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The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

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Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#61

Post by DrewADesign »

shimman wrote: post #26
stalfie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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'…

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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#62

Post by scotty79 »

marshray wrote: post #52
scotty79 wrote: post #44

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…

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…

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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#63

Post by cromka »

mcoliver wrote: post #54

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 o…

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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#64

Post by dice »

sarchertech wrote: post #47
jonners00 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#65

Post by baxtr »

sarchertech wrote: post #35
fwipsy wrote: post #10

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…

> 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…

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?

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#66

Post by marshray »

flexagoon wrote: post #40
bbor wrote: post #13

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."

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#67

Post by saghm »

mcoliver wrote: post #54

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 o…

> 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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#68

Post by sieabahlpark »

cromka wrote: post #63
mcoliver wrote: post #54

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 o…

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.

[dead]

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#69

Post by marshray »

sarchertech wrote: post #35
fwipsy wrote: post #10

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…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows

#70

Post by kstrauser »

mcoliver wrote: post #54

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 o…

Name and shame. I'd be furious if I were one of the thief's tricked customers.
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