cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41302017

https://societyofauthors.org/2025/04/01/soa-day-of-action-following-allegations-of-metas-mass-theft-of-authors-work/

The SoA is organising a day of protest against Meta following revelations of pirated books being used to train their large language models

On Thursday 20 March, The Atlantic broke the story of how Meta has used the Library Genesis (LIbGen) dataset, which is full of pirated material, to develop their AI systems.

The revelations detailed by The Atlantic come against the background of the recent government consultation into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright and the #MakeItFair campaign which sees the UK creative industries fighting back against the proposed changes to copyright law, which would favour multinational tech companies, but irremediably damage the creative industries.

  • Commercial/state-enforced AI crawlers overburdening services and forcing admins to increase cost and time spent dealing with these DDoS attacks is much closer to theft than the piracy itself. Piracy doesn’t make people lose money, AI crawlers do.

    👉 👃

    Every person who says “piracy makes me lose money” is lying (or at least profoundly confused about how “income” works).

    Crawlers take up actual assets (bandwidth and time) that actually take money from your pocket. Piracy may or may not reduce your potential (key word!) income.

    One of those two is legitimately a property crime.