Our open letter to META

It has come to our attention several books published by SRL Publishing have been used in the training of Meta’s generative AI models without permission and in violation of our rights under legal protection and copyright.

We are writing a letter as a publisher who is extremely concerned about Meta’s misuse of our author’s creative work. In every book we publish, on the copyright page, the following is mentioned:

“No part of this book shall be used in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence (AI) systems or technologies.”

This letter is to remind Meta that you do not have the right to use work published by SRL Publishing and its imprints to train your AI models, we do not allow our work to be used in such manner.

We hope Meta will set an example of responsible, legal, and ethical use by obtaining (from those who wish to agree) permission before using authors’ works going forward and compensate for the use already made and, ultimately, remove all SRL titles from your database. A full list of SRL titles found on the LibGen site are listed below.

• Cherrington Academy, by Rebecca J Caffery
• A Monster’s Tale, by Kelso Simon
• Kennedy is King, by Cameron James
• Darkridge Hollow, by Nicky Shearsby
• Black Widow, by Nicky Shearsby
• Beyond the Veil, by Nicky Shearsby
• Verona in Autumn, by Tom Lloyd
• The Mind Hack, by Stewart McDowall
• The Disappeared, by Amy Lord

SRL publishes this open letter to be as transparent as possible, to publicly state that this is not okay and to urge Meta, alongside other large companies to back the creative industry and respect intellectual property. SRL Publishing have additionally sent a cease and desist letter to Meta.

Signed,

SRL Publishing – Publisher

Robert Welbourn – Author

Emma Whittaker – Author

Tom Lloyd – Author

Amy Lord – Author