It seems like this person wanted to help with AO3 being down in their own way, but somehow decided that scraping the internet for fanworks and hosting them on a new site without asking permission from any of the creators was a good idea.
It seems similar to those people who will dump a 40k LoC Pull Request on an open source project that they vibe coded. Wanting to help, but misunderstanding every step, or like, how to interact with an established group. The article does say that the guy who made the vibe coded site is 17, so I don’t wanna be too hard on him, but maybe he should have reached out to OTW to see if there was anything he could do to help first.
[the website creator] scraped the internet for works to populate the site using “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines were scraping the internet for all drives, scrapes, and sources,”
Also this kind of stuff is wild because a lot of websites aren’t really built to handle the insane traffic from bot crawlers.
decided that scraping the internet for fanworks and hosting them on a new site without asking permission from any of the creators was a good idea
The thing is, in any fetish and fanfic community there will be a body of works accumulated over the years that contains many classics but the authors are only a nickname. Sometimes there’s an email listed that stopped working decades ago.
The sites that host the works are usually run by enthusiasts. Over the years they lose the incentive to maintain them. Whenever a site goes down and others take its place there’s always a dilemma about what to do with that body of work.
Technically speaking, yes, any site that’s not the site where each author originally uploaded their work is in breach of copyright and/or licensing for those works. On the other hand, if you were to attempt to contact each author and only carry forward the works where you get an answer and permission… only a tiny fraction would qualify, and massive portions of the literature would be lost in each move.
Thats a good point. Things do go down forever and its nice to have backups to preserve history. Though in this case it seems a bit premature because OTW and AO3 are just down afaik, not like, gone gone.
Exactly, there is every intention of them coming back up again. It seems at most like their servers got hacked, and at least that they need (to schedule) maintenance to keep things running smoothly.
If they were gone forever, or there was no published information on what is going on, I imagine much fewer authors would have an issue with their creations being carried on (in good faith) on a new site.
What you are describing happened when Asstr went down and Internet Archive decidied to not allow achriving of some adult material meant large swaths of fetish fiction disappeared.
Someone(s) did end up hosting an archived version of asstr they had but it did not include many of the subdomains(?) authors and groups had created and is missing a large amount of stories.
If some data hoarder out there has a full archive of asstr and you could throw up a torrent that would be great.
The bots are literally the equiv of one user mass downloading/viewing stuff, shouldnt be that big a deal, scraping in general happens a lot with ppl using stuff like ytdlp through web frontends. In this case its mostly text too, its not like he had thousands of bots (feels like you’re conflating a few bots scraping some text and audio to kids doing ddos attacks)
It was a 17 year old kid from India; naive and foolish but I don’t think it was malicious. His post says the audio books were an idea to try and pay for the high bandwidth usage - 120k users in 24 hours, serving over a terabyte of data.
I think he probably had good intentions, but clearly this was a bad idea and of course to many people it looked like someone was trying to commercially exploit the work of many thousands of fanfic authors, plus feeding in to the AI slop fest.