Open letter to Marie Goldman, MP

Dear Ms Goldman,  

I am writing to you following the publication on 20 March 2025 of a report in The Atlantic under the headline ‘The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem’.

The article reports on the evidence which has been revealed in court documents and in legal proceedings which are being pursued against Meta in the Unites States. The piece contains a number of shocking allegations about the practices which were adopted by Meta at the time of the development of its AI model, Llama 3. The allegations have profound implications for UK authors (including writers, illustrators, translators, scriptwriters, etc.), and we are calling on you and the Labour government to take immediate, decisive action.

As with all large language models, Llama 3 needed to be trained on a huge amount of material in which copyright is owned by authors and for which, consent from the rightsholders was required and adequate remuneration paid. Yet the evidence reported in The Atlantic article supports the allegation that, instead, decisions were taken at the very highest level at Meta, to download and use the Library Genesis database (“the Lib Gen database”), which is one of the largest pirated collections of books available globally, containing over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. 

Since publication of The Atlantic article, authors across the UK have been angered by the discovery that their works appear in the ‘Lib Gen’ database. Authors are rightly concerned that their works have been used without their permission to train Llama 3 — a clear infringement of copyright law. Meta must be held accountable, and the UK government must play its part. 

The case on which The Atlantic article reports is just one of numerous cases being taken by publishers and authors against Meta for copyright infringement on an industrial scale. These cases are shining a light on the unscrupulous behaviour exhibited by global tech companies which seemingly exploit copyright-protected material, safe in the knowledge that they will not be held to account. This must change, and global tech companies must now be held accountable and pay for the use they make of authors’ works.

There can be no question that the scraping of authors’ works for the purpose of generative AI training is unlawful in the UK, yet tech giants like Meta are operating in the UK without sufficient enquiry being made into their practices and those of their parent companies. Authors are almost powerless given the enormous cost and complexities of pursuing litigation against corporate defendants with such deep pockets. We call upon you and the UK government to take all action available to ensure that the rights, interests and livelihoods of authors are adequately protected. Failure to act without further delay will unquestionably have a catastrophic and irreversible impact on all UK authors given that from development through to output, creators’ rights are being systematically and repeatedly ignored.

If, as you say, your Government is serious about supporting authors as part of its Creative Industry Sector Plan, and its ambition to grow and protect the UK’s world-leading creative industries which contribute £126 billion a year to the UK’s GVA, it must demonstrate its commitment and stand up against the unethical and illegal practices of tech giants, which have such a devasting impact on the lives of UK authors. 

We writers call for an intervention, and the summoning of senior executives of Meta to appear before Parliament. They must be required to provide a detailed response to the allegations that they have engaged in wholesale copyright infringement and to provide unequivocal assurances that they will respect the copyright of authors, not engage in unlawful conduct and will pay authors for all historic infringements.

Kind regards,

Hamish Monk