#Theft

[hasufin]

Shrinkflation

So, I found out a fun fact this last weekend!

Every state has a Department of Weights and Measures. One of their jobs is to make sure that companies are actually selling you the quantities they claim they're selling. For example, this is the department which tests gas pumps and makes sure they're really pumping out a gallon of gas when they charge you for a gallon of gas.

So....

If you happen to, just as an example, notice that your 1lb (16 ounce) box of San Giorgio spaghetti actually only has 10oz of noodles, and you weigh your other boxes of spaghetti to discover they run from 10 to 14 ounces but never the full pound they're supposed to have, and that's why you never seem to have enough pasta for leftovers the next day, then you can report that to the Department of Weights and Measures.

They will want to know where you bought the item, and then will investigate whether the store or the manufacturer is routinely shorting customers. If they do, they will issue a fine to the offending party, you will be eligible for a refund, and under some circumstances lawsuits may follow.

Now, I don't know the outcome of the complaint I just initiated, but they did not want to know specific receipts or times of purchase. Which is good for me as I didn't keep any of those things, at the time I just said "Wow, fuck San Giorgio" and switched brands. But this is still enough to get an inspector out.

[gooblegorp]

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I broke into T.J.Maxx to steal men’s clothes and ended up getting turned into a vampire at some point in the process.

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[ekingston]

hey guess what is today’s addition to my ever-growing list of reasons to never share another multichapter work online again!

if you’re a fanfic author, you may want to do a search for a line from your fic and see what comes up. someone calling themselves LoveRosieSunshine changed the names of 1. my fic, 2. the chapters and 3. the characters and nothing else & then uploaded it to Wattpad without my permission.

if you enjoyed You & Me & Holiday Wine (the original of which is published only on ao3 here), please do me a favor and report the plagiarism to Wattpad. more screenshots & the link to their ‘version’ of my fic (it’s literally a copy/paste) are under the cut, along with directions on how to report even if you don’t have an account. if you do have an account, i’d appreciate it a lot if you could leave them and/or their readers a comment about the fact that this is the exact kind of bullshit that stops authors from sharing the stories these readers profess to love so much.

i’d be grateful if you guys could share this post with fandom friends, as well. i’m sure this person has never actually written a single story in their life, so if you have f/f work on ao3 you’ll want to check if yours wasn’t stolen, too.

i know i’m asking a lot, but Wattpad will only allow me to file a DMCA—which requires me to share my full legal name and address with Wattpad as well as the plagiarist, which i’m obviously not comfortable doing. for fuck’s sake.

if you ever see any of my work on Wattpad, that is theft. i will never share my work there, and i would appreciate you letting me know if you find it reposted. apparently this one has been up for at least a year and i don’t know what makes me want to throw my laptop harder, the comments saying ‘that’s SO [character i’ve never heard of]!’ or the people recognizing it as a supercorp fic and then carrying on as if that’s perfectly fine.

[reality-detective]

Listen up American Taxpayers

A Boeing Whistleblower Report shows defense contractors are robbing taxpayers, the government did an investigation and found

- Boeing charged an 8,000% markup on 44 generic soap dispensers. costing taxpayers an extra $150,000

- Boeing overcharged $300,000 for retainer bands

- They marked up transmitters 3500%, costing taxpayers an extra $142,000

Images of each item are included in the video and it should make you furious 🤔

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[jangillman]

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A post shared by Randy K Franks 33 (@randykfranks)

[phoenixyfriend]

OpenAI is whining about how DeepSeek "stole" from them to train their own model, which is against ToS

[fanfictionlibrary01]

AO3 works being stolen and posted on rivd.net

What is happening, and what you can do. Check for edits with additions at the end of the post!

We've posted these infos in our Discord server, but want to make them accessible for more of you AO3 and fanfic folks out there. What is happening? A user called "Fanfic Books" on the site https://rivd.net is posting over a million of fanfics since May 18th (account creation time of that user), all of which seem to be stolen from AO3 users. You can check if your works were stolen by searching your AO3 username on that site. Reporting this on the site is tedious, and contains so much requested data and personal (sensitive) information about you that is just seems sketchy and like they want to grab your data to sell it off again. (See this for more on that.) That a virus called "rivd" apparently also exists does not help their case. Since the person posting the works is also listed as Moderator of the website, chances of successful reports are, by our estimation, very small to non-existant. (As you can look up here.) Creating an account on that site is also tedious - after trying it, the feedback was that a moderator needs to approve of my account creation request. How long that is supposed to take is not known. What can you do? We deduced - through admittedly rushed, because we felt like time was of the essence, and and sparce, checks - that people who have their works locked on AO3 have not been affected. (At all/as much is not to say, it's our best hope and theory rn.) We advised our server members to lock their AO3 works for the time being, as that currently seems like the only prevention method available. A great tutorial for how to lock all your AO3 works at once has been posted here. Kudos to this X/Twitter post that seemed to have started the spread of information, and others relaying the infos (like e.g. r/AO3 on Reddit). Edit (0,5h after initial post):

With permission of the author on AO3, here are screenshots from when I checked if their works (unlocked on AO3) were stolen. Searching for works of the FFL Discord server's admin, who has them locked on AO3, resulted no matches on the rivd site - hence the theory/recommendation that locking your AO3 works helps.

Edit 2 (4h after initial post):

There also seems to be a new occurrence that the fanfiction tab has been emptied/does not contain (publically displayed) fanfics anymore. What this means and if the fanfics are really taken down is unclear, but given that the anime fanfic category that once existed is seemingly completely gone, something is being done. Rumor is that a mass report of DMCA at Cloudflare caused this - it feels like a win either way!

Edit 3 (23h after initial post):

It seems like rivd.net is now completely down/inaccessible. See last attached screenshot in this post! No infos on what this means or what caused this are available atm, but like before, it feels like a small win!

[mangoshibi]

While you where scrolling by….

HE TOOK YOUR LEFT SHOE!!!

[destielmemenews]

"Noem, who was asked about the theft at the White House Easter Egg Roll, acknowledged the incident and said the matter has not been resolved.

The Secret Service, which provides security for Noem, reviewed security camera footage at the Capital Burger restaurant and saw an unknown white male wearing a medical mask steal her bag and leave the restaurant, a law enforcement source said.

The thief got away with Noem’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, makeup bag, blank checks, and about $3,000 in cash."

CNN

Associated Press

USA Today

[one-time-i-dreamt]

My sibling stole half of my potatoes.

[a-pox-upon-thee]

[reality-detective]

PRESIDENT TRUMP: "The train that's being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the worst managed project that I think I've ever seen... Hundreds of billions of dollars over budget... We're going to start an investigation of that."

Nancy Piglosi, her husband, Dianne Feinstein and her husband are involved in this money laundering fiasco. The land was bought and sold 3 times through government grants so every taxpayer in the whole country has been paying for it. 🤔