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Failed Writer's Journey: Meta's Theft of Books [1]

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Date: 2025-03-21

I have written about this before, but the Atlantic has a really good article about Meta’s theft of books and articles to train their imitative AI. Short story, they knowingly used material from a database of pirated works called LibGen. You can go to the article and see if your work ended up being used. I won’t dwell on this too much since I have already written on it, but there are two points I would like to hit briefly: writing and creating art so work and deserved to be paid, and this is the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s fault.

The libertarians at the EFF have always hated copyright. Much of this stems from the Napster era, where music firms went punitive on people fire sharing. And while there were excesses (the fines for a single violation could be six figures), the EFF seemed to hate the idea that artists could control their copyright at all. Their ideas for “solving” file sharing were essentially Spotify — and it worked as well as one would expect, with artists making no money on the use of their work. To this day, they place the ability for others to use created material ahead of the ability of artists to profit and thus make a living doing creative work.

The EFF claims that “The would-be speaker has to prove their right to speak: for example, by persuading a court that they were making a fair use. And the penalties for a court deciding your use was infringing are devastating.” Yeah, imagine that — a writer wants to ensure that they benefit from their work instead of seeing others do so. What horrible censors they all are. It is as if the EFF either doesn’t care about creative people or doesn’t understand that unless people get paid for their work, only patronage exists as a means of funding arts. Given their massive blind spots about the power of business as compared to the power of the government, I am honestly not sure which it is.

Yes, copyright law needs to be reformed (terms are too long, etc.), but in such a way that balances the benefits of copyright — not in a way that legitimizes “sharing” files like Napster and LibGen does. I suspect that one of the reasons that the EFF has been so quiet on the destruction of creative livelihoods is that they must, at some level, recognize that their defense of Napster (file sharing is here and won’t go away so we should learn to live with it. ) is a defense of the pirating of all material, like the LibGen pirated books. They opened this door decades ago and now imitative AI thieves have walked right through it.

Speaking of thieves: don’t steal books. Or songs for that matter. It is almost never all right, especially if you live in the West. Libraries exist. I know — I essentially learned to read in a library. If you cannot afford something, the library can. And using the library is much better than taking the material without paying. Artists continue to make a living, you get to read what you want to, and others in the community might as well. Wins all around. Unlike stealing books, which just ensures you have less to read in the long run.

Weekly Word Count

Ten thousand, one hundred. Yeah, a good week.

Almost at the end of the first draft. The final confrontation is starting. There will be thrills! excitement! bloodshed! python scripts! inert gas fire suppression! server rooms! Umm, yeah, well, it is a bit if a technical thriller after all. And look, man, server rooms are cold. You could almost get something approaching something that kind of looks like it might be the start of frostbite if you never left one. Very dangerous.

With any luck, by this time next week the first draft will be done. It is shaping up to be a little be shorter than I planned, but I tend to under write, so I assume the next draft will help.

I know I need some character work and to tie some scenes together a bit better. Once I am done, it is going into the truck for a couple of weeks to let my mind get some distance. I’ll probably outline my next project (either a fantasy allegory for imitative AI where ghosts are literally in the machines and murder is the surest way to automation or a script based on the Senate’s bipartisan report in Russian activity in 2016 elections) in that time before taking the beta reader feedback and diving back in.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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