| A message from Dan
After months of careful consideration, I made the decision that it was time to bring the 31-year era of the stormhighway.com web site to a close.
My storm chasing and photography operation and web site has been under an increasing siege for the past 16 years. First, it was the reuploading of my pictures and videos to social media, which would then go viral outside of this site and my Youtube channel, even outranking or replacing my originals in search engines. That's been a tedious battle for me since the dawn of social media. Now, it's artificial intelligence scrapers constantly raiding my pages - all day, every day per my analytics data - taking every bit of my articles, pictures, graphics, diagrams and more all so they can be provided to the public for profit independently from me, completely bypassing this site.
Google and Bing's AI summaries provide the informational content of my pages at the top of search results, and now few users come to my site from organic searches (a phenomenon referred to as 'zero click' searches). My site's traffic has continued to decline as Big Tech completely consumes my life's work for the purpose of monetizing all of its information and imagery. They do this all while providing nothing in return to help me pay my bills and cover my costs of producing all of that material.
It is this de-facto communism of intellectual property that was the final blow for my operation: a seizing of all of the IP in existence not by the government, but by Big Tech corporations. And unlike a government implementation of communism, the oligarchs of this regime don't do anything to provide for the basic needs of the workers they've taken careers from.
I'd previously had to curtail my storm chasing operation, mostly due to the piracy and infringement of my pictures and Youtube videos being copied to social media (I've written about the problem extensively). I've been able to keep my operation going only thanks to occasional copyright infringement case settlements via my agents at Viral DRM. But the AI takeover of my life's work is too much to bear on top of everything else.
There are landmark court cases in progress now (some I am a part of) to address both the piracy issues and the AI scraping threats. To be honest, I don't expect much from these. I'm just tired of fighting. The bad guys are winning. Everyone supports them. I'm even called the bad guy for objecting to and fighting against the fruits of my life's work creating great success and paying the bills of Big Tech and pirates, but not for me.
I am not sure where I will go from here. My Youtube channel, photo galleries and my page documenting the infringement problems will remain online for now. I'm putting some effort into organizing my existing and new material into book form, though I'm not sure if that will be viable. That kind of publishing faces the same existential threat from piracy and ingestion into AI systems as my web site did.
I'll close on a positive note. I'm thankful for everything I've been a part of in what has been an incredible life of adventure. I'm especially grateful for all of the readers and viewers I've had over the past 31 years. It's been a great ride. For those who have supported me during that time, I send my sincerest thank-you. I'm confident the Lord will guide me in where things go from here. He's always taken care of me, and I am at peace knowing that won't change as this chapter of life concludes.
-Dan
I'm keeping these online:
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