I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.
IN SHORT
Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.
When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using
his dyslexia;
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,
as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.
When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.
THE TAKEAWAYS
1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors’ permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.
THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)
Hey folks, I doubt many people will see this message or the comment I left about it down below, but if you’re reblogging this post with death threats or calls for physical violence against this man, I am blocking you. I want this post to reach as many people as possible, and if you carry on like that you’re not just incriminating yourself, you’re giving tumblr reasons to nuke this entire recap. Thank you.
So deer have this instinct to stand tall and walk like a king when they notice something (a predator) watching them so they look like strong opponents since predators usually target the weakest members of the herd. The baby is doing the Don’t Eat Me Walk.
Predators: “How could I possibly eat someone THAT cool??”
The irony of doing deforestation in a land that already has nearly no forests, only to place some giant bird-killing things there in the name of “green energy.” Don’t let me even get started about how much harmful manufacturing processes need to take place to make wind turbines.
>the trees that were cut down were a commercial crop that would have been cut down regardless
>this was over a 20 year period that they planted 272 million more trees
>That 14 million is less than 1% of the total woodland area in scotland
Also, scottlands peat bogs are excellent at carbon sequestration, and misguided attempts at “"reforesting”“ the peat bogs back in the 80s and 90s resulted in hundreds of thousands of failed trees and destroyed the actual natural habitat of peat and heath.
Everyone makes fun of Endor for being a single biome planet but talk about rewilding spaces and suddenly we’re all displaced ewoks.
The word garbage sounds like it should mean clothing
It does! Or rather, it does come from garb. Garbage originally meant the small fabric scraps left over from tailoring–all the tiny bits that were too small to cut a pattern piece from.
Back when you generally bought fabric by the yard from a draper and then took it to a tailor to be made up, keeping the garbage was the tailor’s perquisite. Unscrupulous tailors were accused of deliberately cutting to maximize the garbage, which still had various uses in tailoring–as padding, or for backing buttons–and could also be sold for making paper.
That is DELIGHTFUL information oh my god!!! Oh that’s my new favourite bit of trivia thank you so much
Idc if there is a male love interested in Wicked, you don’t call someone “rather peculiar and over all quite impossible to describe” in the VERY FIRST SONG without intending to say “I want to fuck my roommate”
