Meta must be held to account for its use of copyrighted books, authors say

A group of prominent authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta to account over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.

- Ella Creamer

The letter asked Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to summon Meta senior executives to parliament.

"There is a longstanding contractual obligation that when third parties make use of an author's work they compensate us," said McDermid. "Adaptation, translation, photocopying - they all accept the duty to recompense us for making their work possible.

"I'm a crime writer - I understand theft when I see it. And by using pirated material, Meta are stealing from us twice over. I don't think it's at all surprising that we're outraged."

Earlier this year, a court filing alleged that Meta's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, approved the company's use of a notorious "shadow library", LibGen, which contains more than 7.5m books. On 20 March, the Atlantic republished a database of the titles contained in LibGen, through which many authors discovered their works may have been used to train Meta's AI models without their permission.