Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify, scraped hundreds of works off the Ao3 without their authors’ consent, and uploaded/plagiarised them to his own for-profit website and companion application, WordStream.

Upon calling out his non-consensual actions, he issued an apology and came up with 3 excuses:

• His dyslexia
• His implementation of a tipping system for the plagiarised authors
• A note to take down the works of authors who individually reached out to him to ask for their work to be taken down

Obviously, we had issue with his excuses.

This man plagiarised hundreds of works without authors’ consent and is only removing them after contacting WordStream support to take down each individual work.

After severe backlash, Cliff claimed to have removed all published fanworks from his site, but upon investigation, they are still live but carefully hidden. You can still find the archive on WordStream’s servers containing the works through a Google search of the title + “WordStream”.

Eventually, Cliff resorted to blocking authors who were requesting their works to be removed from their site.

This man is not only breaching copyright law (fanfiction writers’ works are their intellectual property and are thus protected under federal copyright law), but is actively going out of his way to prevent authors from claiming what was already theirs to begin with.

So, what do we – members of the fandom – want to be done about this?

First, we want all of our plagiarised work properly removed from WordStream. 
Second, we want Cliff to be held accountable for his illegal actions. 
Third, we want to establish a clear understanding that what was done was not only immoral, but highly illegal. We want to establish a precedent to prevent other sites and people from stealing works that do not belong to them, especially through the use of tools like AI.

Feel free to look at ekingston’s posts on Tumblr for a full timeline of events and clearer explanation of what exactly is happening, linked here.