#justsaying
SHARED FROM JACQUELINE WARD - AUTHOR
What kind of person would think it's OK to steal someone's work?
Over the past few days, it has emerged that a site called Lib Gen has stolen the work of all kinds of authors, and Meta has trained it's artificial intelligence with this data.
The books are all up there on pirate sites for people to download, and if you're thinking about doing that, please unfollow me and delete me from your friends list because you are stealing my work.
When one of my books was released a few years ago, someone I knew emailed myself and my publisher and claimed relentlessly that their kindle wouldn't open the file. I tested it and my publisher tested it and it opened on all the Kindles we tried. She was angling for a free book by trying to guilt us, even with thinly disguised threats of 'returns policy' and consumer rights'.
I wondered then why this person thought they deserved my work for free. Or why they thought I shouldn't be paid for my work. This is the same, to infinity. A large organisation colluding with piracy to make sure they don't need to pay authors because they somehow think it's fine to steal.
I have worked for years on my novels. Whether you think they are any good or not is beside the question - they were published and for sale and to take them without permission or payment is stealing. There are a whole range of copyright issues attached, but that falls to the publishers to pursue, and who knows if they will or not.
All my published academic work has been stolen too. And anything I wrote for journal editorial. I spent ten years on a degree and a PhD and the book that came out of it has been stolen and scraped into AI. Apart from the financial loss, I feel like someone has not bothered to put the work in, but decided that the best way forward is to just copy my work. Feed it into LLM and allow everyone to use it for free. Of course, you can read it in a university library, but they would have paid a subscription to the publisher, who then pays me royalties or I get PLR or ALCS.
I feel violated.
Back to my original question. What kind of person would think it is OK to steal someone else's work?
Whether it's an individual or someone in a large organisation making the decision, they have decided that stealing is fine. They must have considered the consequences, and risk-assessed the likelihood of publishers coming after them with law suits and decided they are more powerful.
Part of the problem is that AI and 'scraping' for big data has become normalised. Google has crawled website for ages to allow us to easily search - but websites are open source pieces of information that are clearly marked with a paygate if there is a cost.
This is different. When you open Lib Gen you can see which pirate sites the books and papers have been collated from. This entitled attitude which tramples the rights of individuals is the same normalisation that has seen us happily feeding social media sites with our personal details for 'likes', then wondering why our feeds are full of 'relevant advertising'. It's been normalised.
Make no mistake, I'm the loser here, along with millions of other authors. And now this is out in the open, I am wondering what the effect on publishers revenue will be, as those inclined to theft find out where to steal books from.
I don't feel like writing at the moment. Publishing is one thing, the consumerism and issues like this one that involve payment - but writing is another. It's creativity and it's fragile. Of course I want people to read my novels. But I also have to eat. Most authors are paid less than minimum wage in book advances - I'm sure you can think of exceptions, but these are in the vast minority - and being an author is a job. Or was. Because now books are stolen and pitched as 'free' without consequences, how will that work in the future?
On the other hand, I can't not write. So on I will go, but I will find a way to publish away from the scraping and the stealing and the constant reduction of book prices. It won't be easy, but I will do it.
If you want to search for your own work, the links to The Atlantic article are in my substack article:
https://jacquelinewardauthor.substack.com/p/you-stole-my-words?fbclid=IwY2xjawJOJstleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWPM07zWjCr_hU-Jp9kFwv6VFy0pWt8yUHhT7NFkCyqg_VDXnTuv88TeEw_aem_ideP9vzyKluGoxK3CmCpUA&triedRedirect=true
**I found this link, which offers some advice, but as usual, with anything AI it should have been legislated for before this happened**
LibGen database – advice for authors - The Writers' Guild of Great Britain.
https://writersguild.org.uk/libgen-database-advice-for-authors/
Also if you Google libgen or Library Genisis and go to the Wikipedia site for LibGen you can read all about its history of litigation. It is registered in Russia and the Netherlands.
✍️Carolyn Crossley
VIXEN of VERSE 
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