Marketing Agency Clones an Author's Book, Then Outranks the Original Online

A San Francisco web design shop called Qontour (formerly Prompt Digital) built a polished site that republishes John Koenig’s entire book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, without permission — all 311 coined words, their definitions, etymologies, essays, and the 800-word foreword. Koenig, who started the project on Tumblr in 2009 and rode the breakout success of the word ‘sonder’ to a Simon & Schuster bestseller, confirmed he had nothing to do with it. The agency swapped his original photo-collage art for error-riddled DALL-E 2 images, bolted on a GPT-4 feature that lets visitors generate their own fake ‘sorrows,’ and embedded its own Amazon affiliate code to skim a cut of book sales it helped misdirect.

The legal posture is incoherent. Qontour stamped the site with a notice acknowledging Koenig owns the content while simultaneously relicensing user submissions under CC Zero and elsewhere claiming the work as its own under a Creative Commons license — none of which it has standing to grant. The agency frames the whole thing as a fan tribute and a portfolio showcase submitted to Webflow’s directory, but fandom confers no right to wholesale-republish a copyrighted book.

The damage is amplified by search and AI. The bootleg now ranks above the official site, the publisher, and Wikipedia for nearly every relevant query, and both ChatGPT and Gemini cite it as the authentic site and credit Koenig as its creator. Simon & Schuster filed two DMCA takedowns with Google last July to no effect. The case is a clean illustration of how AI-generated content plus SEO can quietly displace an author’s real work — and how conversational AI search, which hides sources and flattens context, launders the impersonation into apparent fact.