Today, Thursday 3 April, Society of Authors (SoA) members will be demonstrating outside Meta HQ at King’s Cross, after millions of books were allegedly stolen to train Meta’s AI.
Authors and publishing creatives from across the UK, including multi-million selling household names Tracy Chevalier, Kate Mosse and Daljit Nagra, will be demanding immediate answers from Meta bosses, branding them the #MetaBookThieves.
The SoA is demanding answers from Meta and calling for an urgent meeting with Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, who thus far has made no comment at all regarding the biggest wholesale attack on British books in history. This undermines the whole of the creative industries, which are worth £124 billion to the UK economy.
To add your voice, please sign our open letter.
The SoA is writing to Meta and we will personally deliver the letter to them at the protest. We will also be sending the letter to Meta’s headquarters in the US.
Last week, The Atlantic revealed Meta’s use of the dataset Library Genesis ‘LibGen’ to train its AI model Llama 3. US Court documents show that Meta used one of the most notorious online shadow libraries of pirated works (including over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers) as a way to quickly and cheaply access and exploit ‘high-quality LLM training data’.
It is unacceptable that a multi-national company like Meta would use unlawful data rather than licensing authors works through existing channels. The number of books affected is unclear, but this pirated collection ranges from fiction to textbooks, poetry to translations. This is copyright-protected work and creators must be asked for consent and offered appropriate payment.
QUOTE FROM VANESSA FOX O’LOUGHLIN/SAM BLAKE, CHAIR OF THE SOA BOARD:
Chair of the SoA’s Management Committee, Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin, who is the bestselling crime writer Sam Blake said:
“Stealing our books is illegal, shocking, and utterly devastating for writers. A book can take a year or longer to write. Meta has stolen books so that their AI can reproduce creative content, potentially putting these same authors out of business. If Meta had broken into our houses and stolen our laptops we’d call the police – they can’t help us, so we’re calling on the government, our elected representatives, to help with this utterly reprehensible theft.”
QUOTE FROM KATE MOSSE, SOA FELLOW
‘For writers, and all those who make a living by their hard work, originality and imagination, this is another David & Goliath moment. Copyright exists, the terms and licensing provisions are robust, the law is clear. This is theft on a large scale and it must stop. Fair is fair.’
QUOTE FROM ANNA GANLEY, CHIEF EXECUTIVE:
‘Authors are rightly up in arms after The Atlantic published court documents detailing Meta’s alleged use of the dataset Library Genesis (‘LibGen’), one of the most notorious online libraries of pirated works, to train its Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, Llama. The fact that these online libraries of pirated books continue to exist is bad enough, but when global companies use them to unlawfully access and exploit authors’ copyright-protected works – it is a double blow for authors. Mark, my words, we need action.’
QUOTE FROM AJ WEST:
SoA member and bestselling author A.J. West is the director of today’s protest. He said:
‘I was horrified to see that my novels were on the LibGen database and I’m disgusted by the Government’s silence on the matter. To have my beautiful books ripped off like this without my permission and without a penny of compensation then fed to the AI monster feels like I’ve been mugged. Authors have been too friendly for too long. Enough polite, it’s time to fight!’
