Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>Copyright is a huge societal negative externality. Access to Knowledge should be universal and not just restricted to companies big enough to escape the law. To book publishers: close Libgen? You will never see my money again, because I will never buy a book again. I will just use the next LibGen. </p><p>"Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.</p><p>This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. OpenAI did not return a request for comment.)</p><p>Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram)."</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theatlantic.com/technology/arc</span><span class="invisible">hive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/GenerativeAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GenerativeAI</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Copyright" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Copyright</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Libgen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Libgen</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Meta" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Meta</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Llama" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Llama</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/OpenAI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OpenAI</span></a></p>