Avast, me hearties, yonder be pirates
Well would you look at that
The Atlantic has just published an investigation by Alex Reisner into the scale of copyright theft in feeding the AI fad. (nb, the link may be paywalled). According to the article, Meta employees realised that it would be very expensive to acquire legit copies of the vast number of books they wanted to use and so they had the wizard wheeze of torrenting the contents of a piracy site, Library Genesis. Library Genesis does not disguise the fact that it is a giant repository of ‘free’ books, and I see that its users, or those on Reddit at least, are enthusiastic pirates.
If Reisner is correct, and (a) he is working from legal filings by Meta and (b) I’m guessing that The Atlantic had its fact checkers and lawyers go over it in very fine detail, then Mark Zuckerberg himself gave the go ahead. I find it difficult to believe that Meta was not aware of exactly what it was doing.
Why do I mention this? Because The Atlantic provided a searchable database of the pirated works and I find that my novel The Raven and the Hart is on it. A novel that has, since it was published, earned me the untold riches of just over £200 ($260 at today’s mid-market exchange rate.)
So if anyone finds themselves here through a search for the headline items mentioned in this post and feels like helping a brother out, my books are all available on Amazon and, later in the year, on other platforms. Meantime, it beggars belief that the UK government seems able to condone the behaviour of these thieving bastards.
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