Allegedly, Meta and OpenAI used AI to "scrape" Lawyer Vampire Books I Authored

Last Friday night I was scrolling through Threads (owned by Meta) when I discovered both Meta and OpenAI allegedly “scraped” (used without my permission my intellectual property) two vampire novellas (Click this link if you want to purchase Vampire Esquire’s War). They downloaded a pirated dataset from LibGen (see below) where millions of books are contained and used the dataset (including my books) to train their AIs.

As for my books, I made them cheap, and you can listen to the audio version, too. The books are eBooks and audiobooks on Amazon, and they were published 10 years ago. They did well, especially for a new author. Note: please buy my books.

Ironically, I’ve been planning a prequel as well as a third installment in the series. You can do so much more with characters that can live hundreds of years.

Anyway, I saw a post on Threads of all places about LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database (run by the Atlantic Monthly). And my books were listed on the database(both the Amazon and Barnes& Noble editions). The Authors Guild also publishes a guide as to what you should do if your work is pirated (stolen).

AI using without permission the works of authors, by scraping, copying, stealing, or whatever you want to call it is theft. At a minimum, it’s copyright infringement because I see no way “fair use” applies here.

Without getting to technical, whenever you write something or create something that is “original” and in “fixed or tangible form” it generally receives copyright protection provided it doesn’t fall under any of the exceptions to the copyright laws (such as fair use or if it’s something that just isn’t copyrightable such as facts). The best evidence of this is to register your work at the U.S. Copyright Office, through the library of Congress, which I did.

Before AI I would have said it’s probably not necessary for you to copyright your work because writers rarely steal from each other. Now, I think you should copyright your work, and you shouldn’t run it through AI even if that AI is supposedly “safe.” I don’t trust AI to refrain from pirating my work.

We are only going to see more of this, and I urge you to be vigilant. Search your work and make sure it hasn’t been stolen. If it has, consider writing a cease and desist letter; even hire a lawyer to do it. You’ve worked too hard to let your work be stolen. And the U.S. Copyright Office has a judicial forum devoted to the pursuit of smaller copyright claims as a way to encourage vigorous protection of copyright without spending millions in the process.