Some Words on WigglyPaint

A well written piece on a sad state of affairs.

Good article, and I feel your pain. Sometimes it feels like there's no point creating anything anymore, because shitty people will just steal it.

In case you're interested, though, I just wanted to point out that there are things you can do.

In my experience, Google does respond to requests to scrub infringing sites from their results if you submit their Copyright Claim form. They even give you a dashboard with the status of your claims. Probably worth trying your luck if you can be bothered.

Also, many of the theives have X and Bluesky accounts, and I don't believe either of these services let users censor replies to them.

There's also the payment platforms that are collecting money for your stolen work on behalf of these guys. They might be interested to hear about what's going on.

Then there's the hosting companies themselves, of course, hosting the infringing websites.

It's a pain, and it would be better if you could just create stuff and people weren't shitty, but we live in a fallen world and sometimes you gotta defend yourself. Up to you, of course, and I totally get it if you don't have the energy, but I've been through the same thing and you do have some power.

Yes I’ve had to do this but it does work. Unfortunately it’s a constant cost to have to look for stuff like this and then do the work.

Full support to the author, I hope they'll be able to keep making things that are interesting and outside the box like Decker and WigglyPaint. I hope they'll find solace in keeping at creative things.

I also wish LLM copies were not crowding out actual artists.

I have no doubt LLMs are involved in this these days and make the problem worse, but this problem extends back in time too. During the Wordle craze there were tons of people making variations on Wordle. Anyone who's game got at all popular would find search results covered in sites that either just iframe embed their game, or copied the game and took out the credits.

I always register a TLD for my games and I think that might be why my games have always managed to stay at the top of the results, but they are followed by loads of people embedding the game, look at the search results for xordle for example. Many other authors would share their game on github pages or replit or whatever and were not so lucky.