I, like many of my fellow writers, discovered earlier this week that piracy is alive and well in the 21st century.
For most of my writing career, I’ve been on the losing end of the Whack-a-Mole battle against book piracy websites. These sites purport to offer free PDF downloads of popular titles like mine, sometimes framing their criminality as something noble. Here’s the “mission statement” of one such website: “We believe that knowledge and information should be free and accessible to everyone around the globe.“
In reality, though, websites like this aren’t Robin Hood, stealing from “rich” to give to the “poor.” They’re frequently fronts for criminal activity, redirecting the already-meager royalties most writers receive into their own coffers. They distribute malware that turns infected devices into bots for larger criminal operations. They steal and sell user data. Often, they charge users a monthly subscription fee for access to stolen books, essentially fencing copyrighted IP from authors and pocketing the profits.
You know where readers CAN get a lot of free books, including mine? The Freaking Local Library! Digital! Audio! Print! They have it all–for FREE. And if they don’t already carry a book you want, it’s usually just a matter of asking them to order it. (The recent assaults on local library content and funding is a rant for another day.)
Anyway, I’ve come to accept these bottom-feeding pirate sites as the inevitable price of having my work widely available. If readers want to subscribe to fringe websites to get access to cheap/free books, on their own heads be it.
But that uneasy truce was broken last week.
The Atlantic ran an exposé on Meta’s efforts to find well-written prose on which to train their new AI model. Meta employees, apparently, looked into sourcing the material legally, but found their options too “expensive” and inconveniently “slow.” Instead of compensating authors, they decided to hoover up the vast catalog of books available via a piracy site. That’s right. They straight-up stole my entire body of work, along with that of just about every other published author I know.
That’s not even the worst part. This multi-billion dollar company then used my own work to train an AI model whose explicit aim is to replace authors like me.
I actually like generative AI. I’ve already seen the benefits of it in my own life, and I’m excited about what it can do for fields like transportation and healthcare. I’ve recommended it to people – even other writers! – as a useful tool for brainstorming, getting unstuck, and automating tedious tasks. Increasingly though, I feel anxious about how quickly things have spiraled and how unfettered (and seemingly amoral) these companies are. I’m angry that these fat cats of Silicon Valley have stolen something so precious.
For the time being, I’m still using Meta platforms. There are few good alternatives. I hope writing to Meta, as I have done, to express my outrage “as a concerned user and content creator” will carry more weight than me leaving the platforms in a quiet huff. Other actions writers can take are outlined by the Authors Guild.
Meanwhile, though, I’ve started to build a little escape pod: an author mailing list. Starting next month, I’ll be sending out a quarterly newsletter directly to readers. A new marketing and communication channel that isn’t mediated by the mendacious tech bro-ligarchs who just ganked the contents of my heart and soul.*
Please consider joining the email list by entering your email below and pressing the blue Join button:
*I’m aware that even my humble MailChimp list is indirectly within the grasping claws of tech giant Intuit. But since hand-delivering written notes to each of my readers seems impractical, this feels like the best option.