Writers and publishing house representatives have announced that they will gather outside Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg's office in King's Cross, London, to express opposition to his use of the LibGen database to train his artificial intelligence models, reports the Guardian.
Novelists Kate Moss and Tracy Chevalier, as well as poet and former president of the Royal Society of Literature Daljit Nagra, will be among those attending the protest outside the company's offices in the King's Cross district.
Protesters will gather at Granary Square, and a letter to Meta from the Society of Authors (SoA) will be delivered in person. The letter will also be mailed to Meta's main address in the US.
Earlier this year, a US court filing alleged that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the company's use of a so-called "shadow library," LibGen, which contains more than 7,5 million books. Last month, The Atlantic republished a searchable database of titles held in LibGen, through which many authors discovered that their works may have been used to train Meta's AI models.
Society of Authors (SoA) president Vanessa Fox O'Laughlin described Meta's actions as "illegal, shocking and completely devastating to writers."
"A single book can take a year or more to write. The target stole the books so their AI could reproduce the creative content, which could potentially put these same authors out of work," she added.
"We respect the intellectual property rights of third parties and believe that our use of information to train AI models complies with applicable law," a Meta spokesperson said.
A group of prominent authors, including Moss, Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Val McDermid, recently signed a letter from the Society of Authors (SoA) to Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, calling for Meta executives to be summoned to parliament. The statement was published on Change.org as a petition that has since garnered 7.000 signatures, the Guardian reports.
"I was horrified to see that my novels were in the LibGen database and I am appalled by the government's silence on the matter. To have my beautiful books taken from me without my consent and without a single cent of compensation, and then fed to an AI monster, feels like I have been robbed," said novelist AJ West, who is leading today's protest.
A lawsuit filed in January by a group of authors suing Meta for copyright infringement in the US – including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jacqueline Woodson, Andrew Sean Greer, Junot Diaz and comedian Sarah Silverman – alleged that company executives, including Zuckerberg, were aware that LibGen was a database believed to contain pirated material when they allowed its use.
The authors are "really upset," said SoA executive director, Anna Ganley.
"The fact that these online libraries of pirated books still exist is bad in itself, but when global companies use these bases to illegally access and exploit copyrighted works, it's a double whammy for authors."
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