Authors protest Meta's unauthorized use of copyrighted books for AI training
British authors protested outside Meta's London offices on 3 April 2025, alleging the company used their copyrighted books without permission to train AI models, sourced from the LibGen database. A US court filing suggests CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the use of LibGen, which contains over 7.5 million books, while Meta maintains its practices comply with applicable law.
What happened
Approximately 100 British authors protested outside Meta's offices in London's King's Cross on 3 April 2025, alleging the company used copyrighted books without permission to train its AI models.
A US court filing alleges Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the company's use of LibGen, a database containing over 7.5 million books. The Atlantic subsequently published a searchable database of LibGen titles, enabling authors to discover their works may have been used for Meta's AI training.
Reported impact
Author AJ West stated he felt "disgusted and exploited" upon discovering his book 'The Spirit Engineer' in LibGen's database. He said seeing his work used to help technology billionaires earn more money without his permission was "completely disgusting" and that Meta had "fed his books into a technology designed specifically to destroy him."
Society of Authors president Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin characterized Meta's actions as "illegal, shocking and completely devastating for authors," noting that a book may take a year or longer to write yet Meta has used copyrighted works to enable AI to reproduce creative content, potentially putting authors out of business.
Governance controls
Meta stated: "We respect third parties' copyright rights and believe our use of information for training artificial intelligence models complies with applicable law."
A group of prominent authors including Kate Mosse, Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Val McDermid signed a letter to the UK Department of Culture requesting that Meta executives be called to parliament. The statement published on Change.org had collected 7,000 signatures by the time of reporting.
Classification
Sources and evidence
Sources not yet published
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