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 on to fighting this in court on principal which is going to be expensive.
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.
> 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.
Let's consider an independent dev making claims vs the army of lawyers from RIAA/MPAA type claimants. Which one do you think evilCorps will pay attention to?
You can't steal something which is free. This is what you should expect if you give away stuff for free to anybody who happens on it. To me it seems that FOSS people take perverse pleasure in these kind of things.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My company instituted a monthly "best use of AI" award to encourage people to share how they're using it. I suggested we should also have a "most wrong AI output" award to remind everyone they can't just trust it blindly but that hasn't happened yet for some reason ...
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.
That's not surprising, LLMs are bad at pulling hyperspecific facts out of memory. LLMs aren't mapping applications, they're reasoners. Just a poor problem fit
> 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.
> 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.
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.
then DMCA the entirety of google and alphabet, and tender class action for direct and contributory violation, with the option to back it off to the literary work in question when goog takes a seat at the table and takes it seriously
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're telling the truth.
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.
The entire purpose of the DMCA is that it’s a bludgeon that the rich and powerful can use to beat the poor and powerless. It was never meant for individual copyright owners to use against giant infringing corporations.
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.
So you're against copyright protection, but also against AI using copyrighted work? I can understand both of those positions separately, but how can you combine them in the same statement?
there are two different things — one can be against the idea of copyright property, or just copyright laws as written into the legal system, while holding the expectation these should apply to everyone equally
How do you suggest Qontour be held accountable for this blatant theft of Koenig's work and name if the DMCA is a mistake?
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.
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.
Just to be clear: The bootleg site is pointing to the Amazon listing of the actual book (ISBN 9781501153648, Simon & Schuster, published 2021). The Amazon link is not pointing to an AI slop version of the book.
So how is the bootleg site making money? 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.
How are they stealing from Amazon? They delivered a sale to Amazon, which Amazon has a program to reward the effort of delivering that sale. In no way should this be misconstrued as my supporting of the action, but I'm also not delusional making baseless accusations.
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...
AI laundering is going to become a major tactic in all domains. Fiction and nonfiction writing, software, video, music, you name it.
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.
I experimented with turning out complete airport thriller novels this way, using earlier LLMs. It's not terribly hard to make this happen, the hard part wasn't gunning out prose, it was plot arcs and internal consistency, but even that was suprisingly easy to solve.
Of course I didn't do anything with the idea, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
I don't think they are meant to be parodies. Parodies poke comedic fun at the originals. These are meant to confuse someone into buying the wrong version of a popular film. That's why they make sure the names and even the covers look as identical as they can without getting sued.
Literally this is our future, many devs still don't seem to believe we will be able to "zeroshot" everything, but it's because they haven't experienced themselves proper tooling (at the minimum leveraging 4 models in debate, adversarial and loops and workflows and so-on and unli-loop until completion, MITM everything...), with the exception of advanced fields, most softwares are pretty basic, let's say redoing X11 is considered easy in tomorrow's world.
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.
Honestly though, even if this is the future what kind of creator is going to participate in that? Why would anyone put effort in substantial ideas that can just be stolen with a click?
I agree. But I don't understand why the focus is always on FOSS. Why don't proprietary IP owners fear this too? Won't music, movies and non-FOSS software also have their copyright laundered if this crap continues?
I think because a proprietary IP owner can allocate some budget to sue the infringers. A community of OSS contributors may lack the money, the will or the know-how to do that.
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'm interested to see if this is the whole story[0], but on the surface it sure is infuriating.
[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
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."
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 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.
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 Midjouney illustrations and generative text interface merely add insult to injury.
He 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 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.
> He 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 person "digital agency" that probably has 3 clients including mom.
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?
DMCA only applies to 1:1 copy, if you used AI to convert it to something else, then DMCA is the wrong tool.
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.
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.
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 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”.
> 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.
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.
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?
I guess DMCA takedowns are only for the big fish fighting the good fight against car pirates.
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.
Eg https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/06/16/congress/me...
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.
AI is not involved in the actual copyrighted content at all.
https://rhymes.pressbin.com
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.
So how is the bootleg site making money? 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.
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.
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.
Of course I didn't do anything with the idea, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Asylum_films
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockbuster
qontouria, n. The feeling of having your work passed off as someone else's.
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.
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.
[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
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?
I'm sorry, what? What exactly do you think is happening here?
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.
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!