Authors and other publishing industry professionals will stage a demonstration outside Meta’s London office today in protest of the organisation’s use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.
Novelists Kate Mosse and Tracy Chevalier as well as poet and former Royal Society of Literature chair Daljit Nagra will be among those in attendance outside the company’s King’s Cross office.
Protesters will meet at Granary Square at 1.30pm and a letter to Meta from the Society of Authors (SoA) will be hand-delivered at 1.45pm. It will also be sent to Meta headquarters in the US.
Earlier this year, a US court filing alleged that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the company’s use of a notorious “shadow library”, LibGen, which contains more than 7.5 million books. Last month, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen, through which many authors discovered their works may have been used to train Meta’s AI models.
SoA chair Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin characterised Meta’s actions as “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,” she added.
A spokesperson from Meta said: “We respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law.”
A group of prominent authors including Mosse, Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Val McDermid recently signed an SoA letter addressed to culture secretary Lisa Nandy, asking for Meta executives to be summoned to parliament. The statement was published on Change.org as a petition which has since garnered 7,000 signatures.
“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,” said novelist AJ West, who is leading today’s protest. “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.”
A court filing made in January by a group of authors suing Meta for copyright infringement in the US – which includes Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jacqueline Woodson, Andrew Sean Greer, Junot Díaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman – claimed that company executives, including Zuckerberg, were aware that LibGen is a database believed to contain pirated material when they allowed its use.
Authors are “rightly up in arms”, said SoA chief executive Anna Ganley. “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.”
Demonstrators are encouraged to make placards, and the SoA has suggested several protest hashtags: #MetaBookThieves, #DoTheWriteThing and #MakeItFair.
