LAST UPDATE | 17 Apr

IRISH WRITERS ARE fighting against the use of pirated literary materials to train artificial intelligence models without permission or compensation.

The Irish Writers Union (IWU) has presented a petition to the Department of Enterprise and Trade today, asking it to hold Meta accountable for allegedly using a pirated online library to train AI.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has denied breaching any copyright laws to train its AI system Llama but has confirmed that it has downloaded books from the shadow-library LibGen.

The social media company is facing a court case in the US over the matter.

The IWU’s petition is demanding that Meta complies with Irish and EU copyright laws itn training its AI model has collected 1,500 signatures.

“The Irish Writers Union condemns and will resist any piracy of its members works by Meta or any tech company which tries to use material without permission or compensation,” a media station from the union said.

“It is difficult enough to make a living as a writer without billionaires deciding it’s too inconvenient to pay for our work,” said union chairperson Conor McAnally.

“Meta claims to respect copyright and the law but the revelations… tell a different story,” McAnally said.

“Ironically the Meta Transparency Center says, ‘we enforce a policy against posting content that violates someone else’s intellectual property rights, including copyright, trademark and other legal rights.’ Apparently it applies to everyone except themselves.

“The Irish Writers Union will robustly defend our members and their right to fair compensation for any use of their work. We call on the Irish Government to support those writers whose work has been pirated and hold Meta to account.”

Labour TD and media spokesman Rob O’Donoghue echoed the union’s calls for the government to take “urgent action to defend Irish writers”.

“Irish writers are standing up to one of the world’s most powerful tech companies and they deserve the full backing of the Irish Government.

“The creative sector faces enough challenges without billion-dollar corporations helping themselves to books, stories and ideas.”

Members of the Society of Authors in the UK protesting outside Meta's London offices on 3 April 2025. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Earlier this month, around one hundred authors protested outside Meta’s headquarters in London.

Writers chanted “Meta, Meta, book thieves” and held placards with a range of slogans like “I’d write a sign but you’d steal it” and “Get the Zuck off our books”.

A spokesperson for Meta told the Guardian at the time that “we respect third-party intellectual property rights and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law”.