#theft | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hasufin · 1 month

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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.

#food #shrinkflation #theft #corporate greed

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one-time-i-dreamt · 5 months

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Me, my joyfriend, and Ruby from Steven Universe were hunting down Spinel from Steven Universe, because she stole Ruby's toast.

This would make sense if it was for a few minutes.

The hunt for the stolen toast went for *years.*

#dream #joyfriend ?#jeans boyfriend ???#steven universe #ruby steven universe #steven universe ruby #spinel #theft #toast #food

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incognitopolls · 2 months

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

#polls #incognito polls #anonymous #tumblr polls #tumblr users #questions #polls about ethics #submitted nov 30 #gifts #theft #gift giving #ethics

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echoekhi · 5 months

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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/

#ao3 #fanfic #copyknight #theft #copyright

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dispatchesfromtheclasswar · 1 year

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#class war #class warfare #classism #wage theft #theft #illegally kept #marriotthotels #marriottbonvoy #jw marriott

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dduane · 7 months

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Found in the ask box this AM

”I've been playing with [a major AI-driven chat bot] and I asked it to write a young wizards fanfic that contains dialogue. ...I wish i could paste it here, but the character limit won't let me.”

(hiding eyes)

(a) Once more, the reminder: please, please don't send me story ideas or fics set in my universes. Reading them would expose me legally in ways I can't permit. If such things turn up in my ask box, I delete them unread. If through a lapse of concentration or some similar error I find myself mistakenly reading a story idea or fic, I am required to make a note of it for legal purposes, and then can never use those ideas in my own writing, ever, anywhere.

So please understand that sending me a story idea or a fic set in my universes (or others where I write) will guarantee that the idea never happens in my work. It may seem paradoxical and/or counterintuitive, but if you have an idea that you wish I'd do something with, the odds of that happening are significantly increased by you making sure that I never see it.

(This, BTW, is one of the reasons I had to close my ask box to anon asks; some repeat offenders were making it impossible for me to protect myself... as when people refuse to stop sending me such things, I block them. My apologies to all the well-intentioned would-be nonnies out there—but the actions of some of you have destroyed an avenue of access for everybody else.)

(b) Please do not purposefully expose my IPs to the attention of any AI/LLM-based chat platform, anywhere. Unscrupulous whole-book AI-oriented scraping has stolen enough of my stuff already this year. (As my search of the Books3 pirated books database, widely used for AI training, shows here.) It's infuriating enough that bad actors have taken my writing and will be using the expertise inherent in it to put other living, breathing writers out of work. Please don't help them do more of that.

(sigh) Thanks.

#AI training #AI #theft #training without consent #copyright violation

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reality-detective · 1 month

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File a 1040-X Form 🤔

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gooblegorp · 13 days

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#shitposting #r/196 #196 #memes #wunkus #shoplifting #shoplifters #theft

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hobgobknowsbest · 4 months

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#goblincore #goblin culture #goblin vibes #goblin things #goblin community #shoplifting #theft #fuck corporations #fuck corporate greed #fuck corporate america

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kagedbird · 9 months

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IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR DCA COMMUNITY

There is a reposter stealing literally all posts of DCA fanart on Instagram. They go by the name sunny_____uwu [https://www.instagram.com/sunny_____uwu/] and have stolen art pieces from:

@castercassette @chlorenw @bibooby @garbagechocolate @crabfungi @comphey @cacaocheri @strawbubbysugar @rayjeff @ka0tical @restinsodaroni @thatmooncake @monakamoimoi @sunnydbeam @ayyy-imma-ninja @thvnderhashira @hermi-lin @starlite-starbritee @sorveteir @pillowspace @starfr00t @sillyahhchana @eggufrog @sunnybella62 @spookyuu @sanchensky @ayz0 @m340700 @camil0ncha @berrythefish @damien-candle @opudont-donut @okayspicysad @silliemop @noxdelta @groovygladiatorsheep @ronithesnail @midnightfrappe @kitty-c4t @pure-plum @p4hina @ghosting-fox @justjest @bunmuffin @just-a-drawing-bean @aluihart7 @polydna

AND QUITE A FEW MORE!!! Also ones that are solely TWITTER and PINTEREST users and even including those who are ALSO on Instagram.

If you have been tagged YOU ARE LIKELY TAGGED FOR MULTIPLE ART REPOSTS. I've tried to go through all of them but there are so many, so PLEASE DOUBLE CHECK THAT YOU AREN'T ALSO ON THERE. They list people by name but do not link back! And I doubt that they asked you to post there.

As for the reposter: Listen. You may be giving the name for the artist and whatnot in your little message board when posting the art, but you are not linking back to the artists nor getting explicit permission for reposts. Do the right thing, and stop stealing art. Naming the artists isn't enough. Remove the art you've stolen.

Please spread around for awareness!

#DCA #Daycare Attendant #fnaf security breach #Important #Theft #Art Theft

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unbfacts · 3 months

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#Bank #robbery #theft #Diamonds

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one-time-i-dreamt · 9 months

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Jeff Bezos fucking stole half of the Titanic without telling anyone, and the media freaked out because half the Titanic mysteriously disappeared and then a month later it popped up on Jeff Bezos’s lawn and he threw a party inside it.

#dream #text #July 14th 2023 #jeff bezos #theft #crime #titanic #queueueueueueueueueueueueueue

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penvisions · 9 days

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dev is....shocked

okay, so i never thought i'd find myself in this situation. but well, here we are. someone was kind enough to bring it to my attention:

a (newer?) user who goes by @kiwiispunk has basically copy and pasted {garnish} and posted it as her own.

she's changed it from joel to frankie, but the premise and scenes are identical. i tried to approach her about it but she was rather defensive and rude. even going so far as to turn the tables onto me being the one who copied her. here are a few screenshots i took of the interaction:

i took a look at the fic she's passing off as hers called chiffonade. and yeah, it's identical to the original writing i gruelled over for days and weeks to get just right. i reported her but i'm not sure what else to do, honestly.

#dev talks #copy cat writer #discourse #tw discourse #stolen writing #personal #pedro pascal fandom #pedro pascal fanfiction #fanfiction #theft

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micromanatea · 3 months

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“I just want Nintendo to fail”

All of you palworld dickriders are making me so sad. It’s not about competition for Nintendo, it’s a matter of artistic integrity. The ceo of pocketpair is not only a diehard crypto/ai shill, but the assets of palworld have been PROVEN to contain 1:1 copies of Pokémon geometry. [CORRECTION: they are NOT 1:1 rips. They ARE very close, however.]

I thought you people gave a shit about artists.

Where was the support for Casette Beasts? Monster Hunter stories? Digimon? Yokai Watch?

The second a game might seem fun, everyone forgets to stand on business. For shame.

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mahoganygold213 · 4 months

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reality-detective · 3 months

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Chicago Public Schools can’t find $23M worth of laptops, iPads and other electronics.

77 thousand devices were reported lost or stolen in the 2021-22 school year, Lauren Jiggetts reports. 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think about it #think for yourselves #think for yourself #do your homework #do some research #do your own research #ask yourself questions #question everything #school system #educational system #corruption #news #theft

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