How to protect your book from AI piracy

Book piracy has become a big issue in recent months.

In case you might not be aware of what’s been happening, LibGen is an illegal site containing millions of pirated texts from books, research and journals – all stolen and uploaded without permission.

Recently, it emerged that rather than following acceptable means to train its GenAI model, Llama, Meta simply tapped LibGen for that data and downloaded it all from there. Again, without any copyright permissions or author/publisher payment.

The Atlantic has published a search engine for the LibGen database, so you can find out if any of your published work has been pirated.

The Society of Authors has issued advice on what to do if you find it stolen, too.

There are four other things you can do to protect your work from AI training, copyright theft and piracy.

1. Update your copyright statement

The colophon (publishing imprint) page in the prelims of your book contains all its technical information, such as ISBN, national library deposit cataloguing, legal statement and so forth.

The copyright statement on that page should prohibit unauthorised appropriation and reproduction in any medium, mechanical or otherwise. If you’re already published, do review it to make sure all of that information is up-to-date, correct and complete!

To protect yourself against AI theft, you can add a specific clause to that legal statement:

‘No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.’

If you’re already published in ebook, be sure to update and reissue it with that statement included. Do it for print on demand and any new or revised print editions too.

Then, if you find your work scraped by Generative AI, you have clear comeback.

2. Created by Humans

This site licenses AI usage ethically. It supports creators’ rights to own and profit from their work, requiring AI operators to seek prior permission and pay for it.

Registering with them means they can act as an agent for your content, protecting your intellectual property reproduction rights – ensuring you know who is applying to use your work, and for what purpose.

3. Contact the Good Law Project

The Good Law Project is a collective of barristers and legal practitioners in the UK that dedicates its action to fair process and outcomes for litigants.

Currently, the Project is talking to leading digital rights law firms about fighting back against Big Tech AI. This could lead to securing authors’ and creatives’ copyright and intellectual property via test cases and class action.

Legal cases set precedent from which future action can be launched and judged. If you’ve experienced a rights breach, reporting it to people who can actually do something about it is important – it supports you and the creative community, now and for the future!

If your work has been taken by AI, consider registering your interest with the Project.

4. Use Glaze and Nightshade to protect images and graphics

Your book may contain original graphs, images, illustrations, art and other visual content you’ve created.

If you’re putting that visual content up on the web, social media or other platforms online for publicity or other repurposing such as training and education or sales, it’s important to be aware that the T&Cs on some platforms (e.g. X) include automatic LLM and scraping access which can’t be switched off.

Consider using these cool resistance tools developed by tech researchers at the University of Chicago to protect your valuable intellectual property.

How do they work? Glaze and Nightshade make tiny, visually imperceptible changes to the digital file of your visual which, when AI crawlers attempt to scrape it, activates chaos! It makes AI go haywire or see something completely different.

We’re talking pixels, and your original isn’t affected.

Some visual creatives are still posting all their work freely online without any kind of tech or legal protection in place. These days, vigilance over who or what might be using, stealing or exploiting it is key.

Protect your valuable work.

You worked hard to create it, and you own it!