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 postsâusingÂ
his dyslexia;Â
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; andÂ
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a âvalidâ 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 âapologiesâ as well as his website (allegedlyâitâs possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasnât 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.Â
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;Â
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, andÂ
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but theyâre NOT DELETED from Weitzmanâs 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.Â
THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)
Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):
This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)
I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entiretyâthough, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywallâalong with a link promising to take meâthrough an app downloadable on the Apple Storeâto an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:
Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) werenât working, I put âKara Danversâ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.
I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the coversâas well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratingsâmade it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice.Â
I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and Iâve only ever had to deal with art theftâwhich has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was repostedâand I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.
After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work theyâve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobookâ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if theyâd heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.
While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knightâs methods and decided to contact OTWâs legal department:
And then I went to bed.
By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:
@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.
That response came only an hour or so later:Â
Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointingâI doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasnât eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.
I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.
A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)
A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.
Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious pricesâthough in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for freeâmy dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.
Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3âand, as a result, my original tumblr postâbegan taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :
Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didnât screenshot in time so Iâm sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):
which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit userâs screenshot, I didnât see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)
... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)
After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether.Â
Itâs not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume itâs the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, youâre not missing much:
And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.
That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:
They were completed works;
They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and
They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.
If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!
I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.
I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.
Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back upâbut the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***
Thatâs when several usersâthe ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that wayâreported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.
Soooâ
Weâre obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they arenât actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasnât willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.Â
This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:
Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg youâseriously, Iâm on my knees hereâto not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones youâve kept in your âmarked for laterâ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and itâs our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.
Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.
THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):
*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, itâs pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you donât steal some other kidâs art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didnât want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so itâs clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that.Â
**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: itâs even greasier than it looks at first glance. Itâs not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover âartâ, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that canât be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had âfound familyâ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, âenemies to friends to loversâ and âlove triangleâ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrapeânot only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzmanâs needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation.Â
***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but Iâm hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-streamâs search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, donât have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.
Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
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writing fanfiction is just. iâm being so creative and original. iâm plagiarizing everyone by accident. iâm a genius. iâm cringe. iâm too angsty. iâm too cheesy. this is not in character. it doesnât matter that itâs not in character because these are my characters now. i love my hobby. this is the worst possible use of my time. iâm seeking validation. iâm projecting my own personal problems onto this story and iâm barely hiding it. i know so many words and iâm using all of them wrong. im on tumblr posting about it instead of writing it.
I used to watch and rewatch the One Direction video diaries from the X-Factor since they distracted me from my teen angst, and it's just so surreal that Liam is gone
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Re-sharing this post I found on Twitter for people looking for alternatives to NaNo. I haven't tried any of these sites but they might be worth looking into.
Since the whole thing with NaNoWriMo has gone down, I've noticed that one of their former sponsors, Ellipsus, has cut contact with NaNoWriMo because they do not support their stance on AI; I didn't know what Ellipsus was, but upon further research I've found that they are a writing platform that works a lot like Google Docs and Microsoft Word, only with a heavier leaning on the story-writing aspect and connecting with other writers - and they also completely denounce any use of AI, both in the writing process itself and in the use of their platform. I really appreciate that.
Since this is the case (and since I've noticed Google has begun implementing more AI into their software), I've decided to give Ellipsus a try to see if it's a good alternative to Google Docs (my main writing platform). It's completely free and so far, I've found it simple to use (although it is pretty minimal in its features), and I really like the look of it.
I figured I'd spread the word about this platform in case any of you writers would want to give it a try, and if you do, let me know how you like it!
I think one of the weirdest side effects of being a writer is that while I'm reading, I'll just start subconsciously editing the book. Like, if a sentence sounds odd or off to me, I'll fix it in my head and continue reading as if that were how it was written.
NaNo has done dubious things over the years that prompted me to stop using it, but this most recent dubious thing has tilted me from "not using it" to "deleting it." If you're like me, here's what to do:
Log in to your NaNo account
Go to settings
Select "delete account"
Go to the e-mail account associated with your NaNo account, find the e-mail they've sent, and click the "delete account" button in that e-mail
You're done
It's incredibly easy, and I'm hoping that if a lot of us delete - especially people like me, with long-time accounts who have won NaNo repeatedly, who have also supported them monetarily in the past - then perhaps they'll get some kind of message about what a shit idea this LLM stuff is.
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So Iâm on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put âI do not own [insert fandom here]â before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. Iâm fully aware that you donât own the fandom or the characters. Thatâs why itâs called FAN FICTION.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators⌠This was your âplease donât sue me, Iâm poor and just here for a good timeâ plea.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Riceâs lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again.
The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans⌠(that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators arenât making money off of it. It is someone elseâs intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone elseâs IP. Or they DGAF⌠and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isnât much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators âoriginal intentions.â (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanonâŚ
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
Yep I used to have disclaimers on all my Buffy fic back in the day. The Buffy creators were mostly pretty chill about fandom but itâs not like it is now. You did NOT talk about fandom with anyone except other fandom people and bringing it up at cons was a massive no no because of stuff like this.
I think Supernatural (and Misha Collins specifically) was when that wall between fandom and creators started to break down. Itâs a relatively new thing.
I remember going to a Merlin panel down in London and a girl sitting next to me asked the cast about slash and I thought she was going to get kicked out!
Oh man, let me tell you about the X-Files fandom. Lawyers for FOX sued, threatened, and generally terrified the owners of fan websites on a regular basis. God help you if you wrote or created original art set in their (expansive) universe or worse - dared to write about their characters. Even people who werenât creating fanworks, just hosting Geocities pages about how much people liked the show would be sent C&D orders or actually fined. When I was first discovering the concept, the first rule of fandom was you do not talk about fandom because the consequences could be devastating.
It was such a strange and uncomfortable experience for me when fans in LOTR and Potter fandoms suddenly started shoving their work in peopleâs faces speaking publicly about fandom and wanting to engage in dialogue with the creators and actors of the Thing they were into. Fan stuff was supposed to stay online, in archives and list-serves and zines we passed around because it just wasnât cool to talk about it and it could get you in a boatload of trouble. The freedom we have to create and gather together in a shared space, or actually be acknowledged in any way by people outside the fandom was inconceivable to my fannish, teenaged self. I want fans these days to understand how amazing modern fandom really is, cherish the community, and appreciate what it took to get us here.Â
I was one of the ones who got a love letter from Anne Riceâs lawyers. Bear in mind that up until that point her publisher had encouraged fanfic and worked with the archive keeper (one of my roommates at the time) to drum up publicity for upcoming books and so on.
I could tell such tales of how much Anne screwed over her fans back then. The tl;dr version is that she and her peeps would use fan projects as free market research and then bring in the lawyers once it was felt Anne could make money off of it herself. (Talismanic Tours being one of the most offensive examples of this.)
But where fanfic is concerned not only did we get nastygrams but one of my friends had Anneâs lawyer trying to fuck up her own privately owned business which had NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING ANNE RELATED. Said friend was a small business owner with health issues who wasnât exactly rolling in money, so guess how well that went?
On top of that when yours truly tried to speak out about it I discovered that someone in Anneâs camp had been cyber stalking me to the point where they took all the tiny crumbs of personal information I had posted over the course of five years or so and used it to doxx me (before that was even a term and in early enough days of the WWW that this wasnât an easy task) and post VERY personal information about me on the main fandom message board of the time. Luckily for me the mod was my friend and she took that down post haste, but it was still oodles of fun feeling that violated and why to this day I am very strict about keeping my fandom and personal lives separate online.
Hence why those of us in the fandom at the time who still gave enough of a shit to want to keep writing fic DID keep writing fic, but shoved it so far underground and slapped it with so many disclaimers they couldâve outweighed the word count of War & Peace. It wasnât just for the purpose of protecting fic but for trying to protect our personal lives as well.
(Also would love to know who @tiger-in-the-flightdeck knew. Life paths crossing after so many yearsâŚ.)
Lucasfilm also sent cease-and-desist letters to Star Wars fanzines publishing slash.
My favourite bit I read from one included the idea that you werenât allowed to have any explicit content, of which anything queer, no matter how tame, was included, to âpreserve that innocence even Imperial crew members must be imagined to haveâ.
Yeah. The same Imperial crew members who helped build the Death Star to commit planetary genocide.
(Itâs one reason Sinjir Velus, while I still have some issues with him, feels like such a delicious âf*** youâ.)
Later on, they were apparently persuaded to âallowâ fans to write slash, provided in âremained within the nebulous bounds of good tasteâ.
(On a related note, if I wasnât quite so attached to my URL, I would 100% change it to âNebulous Boundsâ, because thatâs just downright catchy)
Anne McCaffrey had this huge long set of rules about how exactly you were allowed to play in her sandbox. Dragonriders of Pern was my first online fandom, and I was big into the Pern RP scene - and just about every fan-Weyr had a copy of these lists of rules McCaffrey wanted enforced. One of which was âno pornâ and another was basically âit canât be gayâ (and for a while âno fanfiction posted onlineâ? which??? anyway.)
Letâs not forget: the reason AO3 is called âArchive of our ownâ is because it was created in response to some bullshit that assholes were trying to play with fan creators. Basically (if I remember the fiasco correctly) trying to mine fandom creators for content which they could then use to generate ad profit on their shitty websites. When the series creators objected, the fans tried to pull their content, only to find that the website hoster resisted, claiming their content was all his now.
To this day, *talking* about writing or reading fanfiction - just acknowledging that it exists - to anyone other than people I know are in fandom as well, feels like a dangerous act. The strict separation I maintained between my real life identity, my online identity, and my fandom identity (yes, they were separate, because some of the most vicious and mocking people were fellow nerds) has broken down a bit these days, but I donât think Iâll ever be able to integrate them as freely as some younger fans do.
Everybody should know that AO3 is just one project of the Organization for Transformative Works. Their mission is much broader than just hosting a (very good) fanfic site. They do all kinds of fandom history archiving and publish an academic journal, but most importantly, they perform legal advocacy to protect the fair use rights of people who make fanfic or fanart.
The OTW Legal Committeeâs mission includes education, assistance, and advocacy.
We create and post educational materials about developments in fandom-related law on transformativeworks.org and on archiveofourown.org.
We assist individual fans when their fanworks are challenged, we answer fansâ questions about law relevant to fanworks, and we help fans find legal representation.
We partner with other advocacy organizations and coalitions in the U.S. and around the world.
We advocate for laws and policies that promote balance and protect fanworks and fandom.
And much more!
I havenât been involved in fandom stuff all that long, but I find this stuff so fascinating!
whew, i feel old, but thatâs mostly bc i was on forums way way waaaaay too young. but this? yes. all the way. people had password protected forums on the weirdest, most unconventional websites. before you could even be approved by the mods they would search your blog, your other accounts, question you, everything, all because we were broke teens and preteens trying to do something for fun and if someone got in who could doxx you or send your work over to a lawyer? that was it, you were OVER. thatâs also part of where fandom wars and the defense of fandom came from: quote unquote âenemyâ fandoms would infiltrate just to hurt you. @theglintoftherail makes a very good point: ao3 is a goddamn haven. and theyâre a great team of lawyers and people dedicated to protecting fanworks! part of the reason itâs so great is because they know thereâs no one like them out there. they also go to the ends of the damned earth to protect you and to be inclusive, which is why thereâs shit like tentacle porn and underage and dubcon. because theyâre dedicated to protecting readers and creators to the death. they donât advocate for it and they have the extensive rating and tagging system because of that (legit the best tagging system iâve ever seen) but they donât know if youâre dealing with trauma or if you need to get something out. do not forget your fandom, kids. jesus
Iâm just the right age to remember the disclaimers and to have HEARD about the Anne Rice, Anne McCaffrey, and X-Files fiascos, but I was never in any of those fandoms and I was more or less on the tail end of that. I canât imagine having to be scared to tell people I write fanfic. So glad weâve come so far.
Every time I start reading fanfics, I thank all of you people whose neverending resilience and the drive to be creative made it possible for me to consume content freely and without worry đ¤
My older fics have the disclaimers. Heck, my older fanart has disclaimers in the descriptions. FFN and DeviantArt were those times, AO3 and Tumblr era I stopped finally.
Since itâs happening again now, letâs not forget the purity brigades of the late-90s and early-2000s who took it as their duty to roam fan fic sites in their fandoms and report anything they deemed unsuitable. And if they couldnât get them removed, thatâs when the flame comments would start, where they would screech abuse at you in the comments boxes.
Back then, this could include anything from the ship they didnât like (look up the ship wars from Potter fandom. The feuds were horrendous and hateful) to something as simple as a g-rated slash fic because âthis of the childrenâ. Hell, when strikethrough happened on livejournal, it was everything/anything which - sadly - also included a lot of fantastic support communities for queer kids and SA survivors and the like. All because the site decided to crack down on âlewdâ/âdeviantâ content and didnât pause to think what else might be tagged under queer and SA content.
A lot of the writers in a lot of the fandoms I was in included content warnings for slash because if people felt spiteful or hostile when they stumbled on it, they could report it to fic hosting sites and have it taken down for any number of excuses. I lost fics on fanfiction.net because some big weirdo deemed them as inappropriate and had their friends all report it at the same time.
This is why Archive of Our Own is so special. If someone doesnât like what youâve written, they donât have the power or right to remove it or erase it because it offends their specific sensibilities. Yes, they can still comment and be a dick, but now we can block and/or report them if they continue to do so.
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Yet another AO3 bot situation - please spread the word!
Hi, it's me again, the person who wrote that viral post about fanfiction plagiarism! Today I'm here to warn you about abuse perpetrated by bots who have stolen AO3 usernames.
There's currently an epidemic of bots going around leaving (apparently random) horrible, hateful comments on people's fics. This isn't the first time bots have invaded AO3, but the big problem with this wave is that they're using real AO3 usernames to do it.
I learned about this when another writer contacted me after receiving the following comment on their story:
Now, while that is my username, I DEFINITELY did not leave this comment (and anyone who would leave something like that on a fic should be slapped! What an awful thing to post). This fic is in a completely unrelated fandom that I have never participated in, nor has that author participated in any of my fandoms, so the probability of it being some intentional fandom drama thing to make me look bad is also low.
The writer whose fic the comment was left on enlisted the aid of some friends and tracked down other guest comments with unrelated usernames attached, which is pretty strong evidence that they are being left by bots at random.
The TL;DR: If you receive a cruel comment from a (Guest) with an actual AO3 username attached, it's most likely from a bot. Please do not lash out at or dogpile the AO3 user who owns that name, and who in all likelihood has no idea that their name has been hijacked for evil.
If finding this kind of comment on a fic, even left by a bot, is likely to upset you, I would recommend changing your comment settings so that only users who are logged in can leave comments. To do this, edit your story settings, and under "Privacy," select the radio button that says "Only registered users can comment," as shown below.
Please spread the word to other AO3 users! And if you see mean guest comments on other fics, maybe let the author know that it's probably from a bot and not a real person who thinks their writing is bad.
Okay with the caveat that I have not personally verified this, but it does appear to be supported by google support threads and their abuse policy--
User sloan_spencer_author on instagram reports that another author they know had their Google docs access suspended for sharing explicit content.
I know that lots of y'all on f1blr use google docs, so I'd encourage you to back up your work locally (on your hard drive/an external drive). I don't know what a good alternative is--I've been using Proton Drive (since I already pay for a Proton email) and I don't see anything in the terms of service about prohibiting explicit content, so. Maybe that and Word or OfficeLibre? Man, I don't know. Our cyberpunk dystopia sucks.
Relevant: when I searched "Google docs ban on explicit work" I found the following link, in which the IT Director for the Tom of Finland Foundation posted about their Drive being monitored for sexually explicit material.
I am the IT Director for the Tom of Finland Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit, dedicated to protecting, preserving, and promoting the erotic arts for over three and a half decades.
We were just notified that files have been restricted on our private, access-restricted drive. They often contain nudity which is 100% consensual, completely legal, and for artistic purposes.
This was originally posted February 2, 2023.
I wish I had better advice, but... yeah. Back things up.
