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SoA day of action following allegations of Meta’s mass theft of authors’ work (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Piracy is not theft.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

While I agree, I also hate Meta. They should have seeded.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Let's be honest here, if the "product" someone sell it's data (video, audio, text, programs, ecc...) and you copy it without giving the creator a cent, that's pretty much theft. ALSO>>> Piracy itself it's not the issue. That's something that everyone (me included) do. And to some extent it's free advertising to the creator of the work, expanding by many times the market for his creations. Also OLD CONTENT's "piracy" it's basically a necessity for the digital preservation of many piece of media art.

BUT

AI training it's different. Without control it will eat up the whole market with cheap knockoffs and enshittificate everything.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I mean what Meta did hardly counts as piracy imo. They used the authors’ works without their permission to train their ai for profit. There’s a big difference between that and individuals pirating books to read and maybe making those books more accessible to others for free

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

No it is absolutely not theft. It is not theft by law. (There's a reason why we have both "theft" and "infringement" in the lawbooks: they're different things!) It is not theft morally. (Theft removes the owner's ability to use something. Infringement does not. Infringement is a lesser moral crime if it is a crime at all.)

Please do not fall into the trap the IP holders like to lay by equating theft and infringement in your mind. You can have your opinions on whether infringement is bad or not (and the facts are … complicated with both sides being largely full of shit on this), but it is a matter of fact that theft and infringement are entirely different things.

Use the right term for the offence. Don't let IP holders' deliberate conflation to confuse the issue get to you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I'm not mad about metas piracy I'm mad they did it without seeding the content. Poor internet citizen.