Everything is fleeting
Hey, its another "ai bad" post. Good thing no one ever reads my thoughts, which also means probably no crawler ever comes here. That is somewhat comforting. Or not, yelling into the void is my speciality by now.
To the topic, recently I have started to read webnovels, mostly the translated kind from Chinese, Korean or Japanese sources. They are weird in their own way and I like that. Recently I have mostly read Chinese ones, I know the least about their culture and especially the idioms and cultural background/references. But, they got a big upside, no one claims them for copyright.
Which is a thing for Korean novels for instance. That is of course because the actual authors managed to get published. Good for them. But the thing is..that publishing takes time and the stuff that was available was complete, and in case of adjacent media, Manga and Manhwa, sometimes even better translated as the official stuff.
I got no moral high ground her, basically I am bitching how my, at best, legally grey reading material is getting taken down. The problem exactly is that I don’t have a lot of time recently, sometimes I get surprising bursts of reading time while traveling or in the night. And then the stuff I found earlier is gone!
There are some things, even if I go and try to buy that stuff legally..its not available in my region. And there was a time that I had access. If only I had made a backup for my personal consumption. Oh wait..I have. Because I am a serial data hoarder..when the data is small and compact. My NAS isn’t huge. But a few markdown files of text is easy to save away for rainy days.
Or it was. We are getting to the core complaint about the current state of reality. Web scraping was always a thing, some script kiddies (well hello there), unscrupulous actors and loner nerds were always crawling around the web and tried to get machine formatted data out of human oriented resources. Some people did not like that and did some token effort to slow down the worst, but no one ever put serious effort into that. Until now.
Those damn tech bros are at it again! In their continued effort to get the last shred of human produced text countless bots squirrel through the web and every site that is referenced anywhere gets hammered by various bots, trying to extract text. This also annoys me when I try to get some metadata for Linkding or even a snapshot of the page when it’s an article.
On this sidenote, more than once I saw a promising article about a niche subject, filed it away and just a few mere years later that site was gone before I had the chance to look at it! Outrageous! Sometimes I feel like the member of some long-lived race that complains about the fleeting humans. But it’s not me that is long lived, this internet stuff is so short lived!
The usual web novel stuff I read is mostly of lower quality, characters get wrong pronouns, idioms are badly translated, names are inconsistent, punctuation is missing. A lot with it is wrong, most of the time its either 1:1 machine translation or machine translation plus a bit of editing, usually the bare minimum to remove the ChatGPT prompts. In short, very very bad sources and not really human anymore. And yet, those sites apparently get crawled as well. A lot.
I actually don’t know to be honest, but multiple sites I frequent recently rolled out some kind of bot protection and it annoys me greatly. Some I crawl with Selenium which works quite well if you wait 30s between requests and doing something else in the meantime. The website structure itself is still easy to deconstruct. But others started to heavily obfuscate their content. And that is annoying, especially when you must fear that all the content is gone by tomorrow.
The good news is that most of those stories are rather mid, I have aborted so many reads by now, but, sometimes there are gems, interesting Ideas in the beginning where the author flups the execution later on, but the idea continue to live with me and I am glad having read this mediocre, badly translated work of some unknown Chinese person. (Another sidenote here, I really wish I had some way to communicate with some of the authors, but there is not only a language barrier, that one big site where much of the Chinese stuff happens is very byzantine for me (as the whole Asian internet is, they have some different web design over there (I had an article about that but the link to it is lost in time..and the blog is probably offline anyway)))
And this goes into a bigger thought, sure, my legally black or maybe grey content is one thing. Books are pretty easy to pirate and to file away, but they are not the only medium I like to consume. I am also in a slight moral turmoil because I haven’t found a way for myself how to handle the guilt towards the involved authors, but that is something for another time. A rather famous example for fleeting media is the series [Scrubs], at least for me. It was part of my upbringing. There is quite a lot of iconic music involved..and those licenses expired and the music got replaced, the original work of art isn’t the same anymore!
And this problem permeates through all of it, games, movies, series. And of course, the fact that some things are just not legally obtainable because the original distribution had a tight lit on it. But that is another side Quest for another day.
Back to my novels, some time ago I found one novel so good that I went out of my way to edit it into a proper format. Those efforts are actually still online...somewhere but I never finished the work. The site I originally lifted the badly translated content from did another thing, their once free content became paywalled again, and then later they got copyright struck, and now the ceased operation all together. But I still got my crawled backup of all the chapter, which is good because I never read the bonus chapters.
But I also got the data and no one else does. And there is the slight urge to publish it, to enable others to read what I enjoyed. The aforementioned novel that I edited has an "official" translation by now..it’s bad. And incomplete, it ceases at a really weird mid point, in the middle of an arc. There is also a Manhwa of it, probably the main reason why it got struck. I read that there is some really aggressive Korean publisher that strikes everything that might infringe their rights, even if they never intend to enter that market. Technical speaking that is their right and I cannot say anything against it as long as I got a better model for intellectual property or a society where it doesn’t matter, and more important, the definite plan how to transition to that society.
All this becomes a bit relevant for me because I recommend one of my novels to a friend and they asked if there is no epub version of. Sure thing friend, I can easily create an epub for the novel..although incomplete because it’s an ongoing publication. So, I can distribute that one epub to that one friend. But it made me think, there are sooo many fantasy novels, questionable quality for sure, and it’s an ocean, but yet, much of it might fade into obscurity in a few years and that bothers me. It opens up bigger questions about intellectual rights, how copy right limits our discovery and makes me wonder if society would be better off without all that.
Last thought, I try and fail to imagine a society where copyright has no meaning, and everyone copies everything from everyone. Distribute things freely. I could see it work in a small community, but humans are human. How long would it take for someone to "sell" something as their own work that isn’t theirs. That society definitely is a post scarcity society, living from creative output without a big stick seems hard. Maybe in a world where everyone only works a few hours per week and has more space for hobbyist things the no-copyright world would be thinkable..but it also needs a culture of respect for the original creator of things. I would love that world, I think.
But for now, I try to hold the water in my hands that are web novels that seeps through my outer appendages.