A group of prominent authors including Richard Osman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid have signed an open letter calling on the UK government to hold Meta accountable over its use of copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence.

The letter asked Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, to summon Meta senior executives to parliament.

“There is a longstanding contractual obligation that when third parties make use of an author’s work they compensate us,” said McDermid when asked why she signed the letter. “Adaptation, translation, photocopying – they all accept the duty to recompense us for making their work possible.

“I’m a crime writer – I understand theft when I see it. And by using pirated material, Meta are stealing from us twice over. I don’t think it’s at all surprising that we’re outraged.”

Earlier this year, a court filing alleged that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the company’s use of a notorious “shadow library”, LibGen, which contains more than 7.5 million books. On 20 March, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen, through which many authors discovered that their works may have been used to train Meta’s AI models without their permission.

The letter claims this is a “clear infringement” of copyright law. “There can be no question that the scraping of authors’ works for the purpose of generative AI training is unlawful in the UK, yet tech giants like Meta are operating in the UK without sufficient enquiry being made into their practices,” it reads. “Authors are almost powerless given the enormous cost and complexities of pursuing litigation against corporate defendants with such deep pockets.”

For writers, “and all those who make a living by their hard work, originality and imagination, this is another David and Goliath moment,” said Mosse on why she signed the letter. “Copyright exists, the terms and licensing provisions are robust, the law is clear. This is theft on a large scale and it must stop. Fair is fair.”

The statement, written by the Society of Authors (SoA), was published on Change.org in the form of a petition, and has since garnered nearly 5,000 signatures.

The letter calls on the government to “take all action available to ensure that the rights, interests and livelihoods of authors are adequately protected”, adding that “failure to act” will “unquestionably have a catastrophic and irreversible impact on all UK authors”.

It says that Meta executives must be required to provide a detailed response to allegations that they have engaged in wholesale copyright infringement and to “provide unequivocal assurances that they will respect the copyright of authors, not engage in unlawful conduct and will pay authors for all historic infringements.”

A court filing made in January by a group of authors suing Meta for copyright infringement in the US – which includes Ta-Nehisi Coates, Andrew Sean Greer and the comedian Sarah Silverman – claimed that company executives, including Zuckerberg, were aware that LibGen is a database believed to contain pirated material when they allowed its use.

Cases against Meta “are shining a light on the unscrupulous behaviour exhibited by global tech companies which seemingly exploit copyright-protected material, safe in the knowledge that they will not be held to account”, says the SoA letter.

A spokesperson from Meta said the company “has developed transformational GenAI open source LLMs that are powering incredible innovation, productivity, and creativity for individuals and companies. Fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this. We disagree with Plaintiffs’ assertions, and the full record tells a different story. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves and to protect the development of GenAI for the benefit of all.”