Writers are set to lose money if the government doesn’t put measures in place to protect copyright theft, bestselling British author Kate Mosse told delegates at at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.
She said her book Feminist History for Every Day of the Year (Macmillan Children’s Books) was already on the ‘shadow’ library LibGen, the database of more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers amassed by Facebook owner, Meta. The Bookseller reported that ‘this data set, called Library Genesis or ‘LibGen’ for short, is full of pirated material, and all of it has been used to develop AI systems by tech giant Meta’, owner of Facebook’.
Mosse said that her book “had been scraped before I even had a copy in my hand”. The Society of Authors said: “Given that Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market capitalisation of £1.147 trillion, this is appalling behaviour.”
The organisation added: “It is not yet clear whether scraping from copyright works without permission is unlawful under the US fair use exception to copyright, but if that scraping is for commercial purposes (which what Meta is doing surely is) it cannot be fair use. Under the UK fair dealing exception to copyright, there is no question that scraping is unlawful without permission.”
Mosse said the so-called “opt out” clause being proposed by the government was absurd. “The opt out means that writers, musicians, artists, whoever – rather than doing their work, which creates growth and brings income into the UK – are spending their time going around all of the many, many, many generative AI companies trying to say to them, please don’t steal my work.”
