Authors unite to challenge Meta’s AI Copyright violations
Meta has allegedly trained its generative AI models on millions of pirated books. Authors and publishers are uniting to demand accountability.
An investigation by The Atlantic magazine revealed that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is using a searchable database called Library Genesis (LibGen) to train their generative AI (GenAI) models. The database contains 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers, much of which is pirated material.
According to The Atlantic, court documents revealed that Meta staff had initially discussed licensing books and research papers legally but ultimately chose to use pirated work due to its speed and cost-effectiveness.
Bestselling author Richard Osman took to X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday to say, “Copyright law is not complicated at all. If you want to use an author's work, you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission, you're breaking the law. It's so simple. It'll be incredibly difficult for us, and for other affected industries, to take on Meta, but we'll have a good go.”
The Society of Authors (SoA) has called for immediate action, stating, “As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rights-holders of all the works it has been exploiting.”
“Rather than ask permission and pay for these copyright-protected materials, AI companies are knowingly choosing to steal them in the race to dominate the market. This is shocking behaviour by big tech that is currently being enabled by governments who are not intervening to strengthen and uphold current copyright protections,” SoA Chief Executive Anna Ganley added.
SoA board member Nadine Matheson also expressed her dismay, noting that she found 13 of her books in the LibGen database, which likely means Meta used them for AI training without permission. She said, “Billionaires with limitless resources could have paid for our books the right way. But instead, they’ve chosen to take them without consent. There is no excuse. No justification.”
Similar pushbacks against tech companies’ use of pirated literature are underway globally. In France, several associations of authors and publishers have united to take Meta to court, calling for respect for copyright and the complete withdrawal of datasets created without permission and used to train AI models.
Francois Peyrony, President of the Syndicat National des Auteurs et des Compositeurs (French Authors’ and Compositors’ Association), said the lawsuit aims “to pave the way for similar actions to protect authors from the dangers of AI, which misappropriates literary works and our cultural heritage in order to train models and generate “fake books” that compete with genuine works by real authors.”
Meanwhile, the UK Government is proposing changes to laws that would allow tech companies to use any online material to improve their AI models unless creators specifically opt-out.
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