The Wholesale Plagiarism of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Unauthorized Plagiarism of a Bestselling Work

A San Francisco-based marketing agency, Qontour (formerly Prompt Digital), created an unauthorized website that reproduces the entire text of John Koenig's bestselling book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The site—hosted at thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com—includes the book's 800-word foreword and all 311 neologisms, definitions, and essays, despite having no authorization from the author or his publisher, Simon & Schuster.

This instance of wholesale plagiarism is particularly notable because the unauthorized site has outranked the official project website, the publisher's site, and Wikipedia in search results for the book's title and the author's name. Furthermore, conversational AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini frequently link to this bootleg site as the official source, attributing its creation to John Koenig.

The Role of AI in the Plagiarism Strategy

While the core text was copied verbatim from the book, Qontour integrated generative AI to add functionality and aesthetic elements to the site, effectively "laundering" the human-authored content with AI features:

  • AI-Generated Imagery: The original photo-collage illustrations created by Koenig and other artists were removed and replaced with DALL-E 2 generated images.
  • AI Word Generator: The site features a "Submit A Sorrow" tool powered by GPT-4 that allows users to generate new words, etymologies, and definitions.
  • AI-Written Marketing: Qontour openly states in its portfolio that every page on its own agency site was written by Claude using an "author persona" called "Q."

Monetization and Misrepresentation

Qontour monetized the unauthorized site through Amazon affiliate links. While the site links to the legitimate book for purchase, the links use Qontour's affiliate code, allowing the agency to earn commissions on sales driven by the traffic they siphoned from the author's original work.

To further legitimize the site, Qontour included a misleading copyright notice in its Webflow directory submission, claiming the site was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, despite the fact that they do not own the rights to the content.

Legal Challenges and the "AI Slop" Trend

Simon & Schuster filed two DMCA takedown notices with Google in July 2025 to remove specific pages from the search results, but these efforts had limited effect on the site's overall visibility.

This case highlights a broader trend discussed by technical observers and creators, where AI is used to rapidly repackage and optimize authoritative human content to capture search traffic and revenue. Community insights from the discussion emphasize several critical points:

  • The Asymmetry of Theft: The cost of infringing on copyright has been reduced by orders of magnitude due to AI, making it easier to spin up high-traffic "slop" sites that mimic legitimate products.
  • DMCA Limitations: Some creators argue that Google and Apple are often unresponsive to DMCA requests unless accompanied by a court order, leaving independent developers and authors vulnerable.
  • AI Laundering: There is a growing concern regarding "AI laundering," where human-authored works (including software) are rewritten by AI to be different enough to avoid legal detection while retaining the original value.

"It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material... It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere."

Conclusion

The plagiarism of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows serves as a case study in the modern intersection of copyright infringement and generative AI. By combining verbatim theft of intellectual property with AI-driven SEO and monetization, Qontour created a digital mirror that effectively displaced the original creator in the 검색 results, demonstrating the vulnerability of human-authored works in an AI-driven search ecosystem.

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