Did Mark Zuckerberg steal Richard's Books?

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1:44Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osmond, hello Marina. How are you Richard? Yeah I'm alright, I'm not too bad, how are you? I'm not too bad thank you, I'm not too bad, we've got a full banquet to discuss today. Have we? Can I fill in a couple of things before we do that? Firstly, on our bonus episode when we were talking about the Bee Gees walking out on Clive Anderson, I said that Barry Gibb had been walking up and down outside Clive Anderson's dressing room, punching his fist into his hand. It was Robin Gibb. It was Robin Gibb doing that, not Barry.

2:17It's a great episode, that, if you haven't heard it. Also, when we talked about Will Smith and the Wolverhampton Halls he's playing, and you suggested maybe we do a sitcom because he's playing there. Joe Pasquale is playing there. Jeremy Kyle is playing there. Dara O 'Brien wrote in to say, if it helps Marina's sitcom, the Wolverhampton Halls dressing rooms are the only ones in the country that have inbuilt saunas. Oh my God, well that's a location. That's a hit, isn't it? That interior sauna. Yes. Right, I'm already thinking about this. Great. Okay, well, I'll keep you posted on how it's progressing as a development project.

2:49This week, what are we talking about? We are talking about... We're talking about LibGen and Meta. LibGen is the pirated database of many, many books, millions, that has been basically wholesale scraped in order to train Meta's AI Lama 3. Have Meta stolen from us all? We'll talk about that. We're going to talk about Last One Laughing, which is a hit for Amazon Prime. Finally, a comedy entertainment hit on streaming. Does this change everything? It just might. And it's a terrific show as well. We're going to talk all about that and about Million Dollar Secret, which has done a similar thing for Netflix as well.

3:23And we're also going to talk about YouTubers being brought in by streamers or channels, whether or not they do bring their audiences, whether YouTubers are saving TV. Beast Games, The Sidemen had a show inside on Netflix, and I have seen episode one of an absolutely cursed thing about Jake and Logan Paul called Paul American. Amazing. That is on Max. You can't watch it in the UK yet, but allow me to have watched it for you. Let's talk first, shall we, about Meta, which owns Facebook and what have you. First of all, The Atlantic, who had a pretty good week. Yes, they were the guys who were on the Signal Chat.

4:03They were added to the Signal Chat. But what I also did was publish a search tool that allows authors to see whether their works, whether their books or even their research papers are on something called Library Genesis, shortened to LibGen. It is a pirated website of 7.5 million books and 81 million stolen research papers. Yes, it comes out of Russia. Everyone knows that it existed. If your books are ever pirated in other countries, which they often are, this is often the source, LibGen. They've been sued a number of times. They've never paid a penny because it's very hard to work out exactly who they are, where they are.

4:42So it is definitively an illegal operation and it holds copyrighted versions of lots and lots and lots and lots of books. And if you've ever written anything at all, you can put your name, go to the Atlantic article, which is great. You can put your name in and see if your book is in there. Now, listen, that happens. There's all sorts of pirate operations out there. Anytime you do anything in television, in film, anything, someone's going to pirate it. However, this site was then used by people who possibly shouldn't use it. Well, by Meta. Now, there is a case proceeding through the American courts, which was brought by Sarah Silverman, Tanahisi Coates, Andrew Sean Greer and a handful of others, they believed that their work had been used in an unauthorised fashion.

5:24Basically, the copyright had been breached in order to train Lama 3, which is Meta's AI. Good name for AI, by the way, Lama 3. I will give them that. I will stand up in court and admit Lama 3 is a good name. Throw them one bone. So, you know, if you want to be legally watertight, LibGen have stolen and Meta have used those stolen goods. And there's one other website that also, which is called Annie's Archive, which is a very similar thing to Libgen. It's got most of the same works on it. And they've used both. And again, they've been sued. Macmillan have sued them before and not made any money because they just, they go into hiding.

5:58So lots of people are stealing here. Well, there's a memo cited in this filing with, in which a reference to an escalation to MZ. Now, some suggest this could be Mark Zuckerberg. So if it's not him, I don't know. then wow, everyone's trying to find MZ who did this. Apparently, they say it's quicker and cheaper, and books are much more important than data, just stuff that's available on the web. So this is the point. So why are they stealing books? And the thing is, they're not stealing books so they can do a copy of your book. They might be. They can do, is what's happening, and they will do. But what they were basically saying is, we've got to train Lama 3, and the best way to do that is via prose, and that's via prose from, as you say, from articles, from books, from all sorts of things.

6:44And they started looking into licensing these things from publishers. That's the first thing they did. They said, oh, look, there's all these books. Let's look at how expensive that might be, how easy that might be. And in all these internal communications, it becomes apparent that it is not particularly cheap and it is not particularly easy. In the communications, someone says, look, it is really, really important for Meta to get these books ASAP. Another person on the email chain said, look, I've spoken to publishers and this seems unreasonably expensive. It said. I'm so sorry. You've had to pay for something.

7:18And also incredibly slow. So that's the situation they were in. And so they're going, well, what do we do? And then someone with the initials MZ, we don't know who it is. It's escalated to a man with initials, oh, it might be a lady. It could be. has apparently has then given the go-ahead to scrape LibGen, which, as we say, is a deeply, deeply, deeply illegal website. And there are even people saying on these email chains, torrenting on my company laptop feels a bit wrong. Yeah. But it's like, don't worry, MZ, whoever he may be, whoever he may be, or she might be a lady, or she could be, has approved this.

7:53Clearly, this has occurred. And Meta are now saying, oh, it's fair use. Now, fair use is a sort of technical term. they say that anyone it uses, you know, authors are influenced by others authors all the time whatever Llama 3 does with this is going to transform the world so it will become something new in the same way that you're influenced by Midsummer Night's Dream but you're not actually stealing Shakespeare which is another reminder that these are the worst people in the world because by the way, what they're saying by the way is true I mean you can, if you know I can read an Ian Rankin novel and write an Ian Rankin novel, you know, I would never do it as well as him but I can ape it in the same way that he could do the same to me.

8:31That's all doable. You can't copyright an idea. If you want to write a book about four pensioners in a retirement home, you know, solving murders, you absolutely can. You can do it. You can't copyright an idea. You can't copyright a vibe. But what you can do is copyright the text of your book. Okay, that's what you can do. And that's what everyone does. Are all your books on this web? Oh my God, all of them. Every single one is on LibJet. Every single British one. Mine are as well. Everybody's books. You'd have been gutted if they weren't. Everybody's books are on there. And also the foreign language versions are on there.

9:04There's the Danish version there, the German version, the Catalan. But I mean, there's lots and lots of versions. There's even like when Sandra and I used to deport this Christmas cash in books. Even they are there. I'm glad that they've been using to train AI. So the argument is I have a copyright in my book. If you want to quote my book, other than in a review, if you want to quote my book or use a chunk of my book or use the artwork of the book or anything like that, you ask my agent. If it's for a charity or something, we'll just say yes, and you can have it, but we have to say yes. We have to have permission.

9:35And if it's for commercial use, we'll say yes or no, and we'll then charge you. Now, Meta have taken the copyright and the text of my books and of everyone else's books. They have not asked, and if they had asked, I would have said no. They have not paid, definitely, and they are doing it definitively. I mean, it's absolutely out of the question. They've done it for their own commercial gain. Well, that's what's interesting because actually copyright theft or copyright breach or whatever is generally a civil matter. But it becomes a criminal matter if it's large scale and the material in our country, in the UK, and the material is used in business with the intent to profit.

10:17Then it can become a criminal offence, supposedly punishable by up to 10 years in prison or an unlimited fine. and that's under something called the Digital Economy Act. I'll tell you what, we don't know who MZ is in this email chain, but whoever that person is must be worried. There is a police intellectual property crime unit within the Met. Actually, they sit in the City of London Police and they have an ongoing operation which is called Operation Creative, which is about the theft of creative copyright. People are being stolen from and we should say again that you, J.K. Rowling, people like that, you're not representative of authors.

10:52Most authors work incredibly hard for very small amounts of money. I can't remember what they say the average author makes. It's about£7 ,000 a year. It's about£7 ,000 a year, I was going to say. They've poured their heart and soul into these things, and they are being stolen. Stolen, and we can see that they're being stolen. It's often a legal website, and they haven't asked. They haven't asked permission, and they've done this. Now, it seems to me when I hear things like, you know, I know I keep coming back to this, but when I hear the Culture Secretary give an interview about Gino De Campo, what about giving an interview about this?

11:21it's like there's been a break-in at the houses of all the most famous authors. And by the way, tons of authors who are not famous. Like every author who lives on your street. Yeah, every single person. And they have done this. Now, the trouble is, is that the government, you know, they're trying to relax laws in this very way. And because they're going to say that they want there to be an exception for text and data mining. Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, says that, you know, this would really help and we're not going to move forward with AI unless we allow this. and obviously masses of creators were opposed to this and the consultation period ends and it seems they're going in one direction.

11:57I have to say after this, I mean, where are they? This is a genuinely awful thing to have happened. Yeah, I agree. And listen, I get it. If I'm a government, I get it because you have to attract as much AI money as possible. It's not going away. It's not going anywhere. If you're meta, which has got a market capitalization of over a trillion dollars, I get that you have to keep up with the other AI companies. You know, those Magnificent Seven companies, they literally, virtually every single gain in the stock market in the US and the UK last year came from AI-related companies. This is an absolute train.

12:33And Chris Lehane, who is, I think, the Global Affairs Chief of OpenAI, who will also not blame this in this, what we're concentrating on, Merta, for now, he said, well, no, look, you sort of have to let us do this because, you know, the Chinese are doing it and the Russians are doing it. So, you know, you're going to have autocrats stealing your stuff or us. Well, OpenAI, of course, were very upset when they felt that DeepSeek had copied their work. I mean, they were really upset about it. It's like, oh, my God, did someone scrape your work without permission? I can't bear it for you. I get all of it.

13:05I absolutely understand all of it. I understand why culturally it's happening. I understand for business reasons why it's happening. So anytime you mention this at all, it gets obfuscated by a million people coming in and saying, yes, but, yes, but, you know, but people can copy people. And, you know, we do have to get on with AI. So forget all of that. Not interested in any argument at all around it because there's a million arguments we can have and a million brilliant things that AI is going to do. So I'm not interested in any of it. What I'm interested in is that Meta, and there's an email chain that said it, said we want to have books.

13:37it is expensive and time consuming to do so and they then scraped copyrighted works from lots and lots and lots of British and American authors but let's worry about British people for now listen if Meta had been unlucky I apologise to them if this is just a mere misunderstanding but it really really really looks like you've scraped stolen material there are greater crimes in the world as well you don't need to tell me that that's absolutely fine but we're an entertainment podcast and we're talking about books and in the world of books and in the world of authors and it doesn't seem currently to be any redress for that and there should be.

14:07Are you going to do something? Are you going to... It's hard to know what to do. What could you do? I know. Because you could spend your entire life taking meta to court. I mean, this is the culture we currently live in in that people can sort of do whatever they want if they have enough size and enough scale and are then brazen enough to say, no, no, no, it's fine what we did. No, no, sorry, you've misunderstood what we've done. Also, they've done it now. They've done it. They've done it now. That's the trouble with all of these things is that you can't sort of remove the inputs because it's done and it's trained.

14:39And they're doing it to lots of other industries, by the way, but as I say, we're an entertainment podcast. So it's interesting to talk about this specific example of what they've done. What are we to do? And it feels like there's absolutely nothing we can do. It feels like there's going to be no recourse at all. HarperCollins, they were offered£2 ,000 for a three-year license to AI their works and some authors took them. And I don't blame you, I would take that money. They're not looking for most books because they want to copy books. They're looking for books because they want their language model to be good and books tends to be the best place to find good prose.

15:09That's what they're doing. And if you can make some money out of it, then make some money out of it. Please, God, make some money out of it because most of us are going to not make a single penny. By the way, I do understand. You've got to be on the AI train, but you mustn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And that's why occasionally you do have to, as creators, just say, no, look, we do get it and we want as much AI money in the UK as we possibly can. and it's going to decimate so many of what we currently know as the creative industries, but it's also going to create other interesting creative industries.

15:41And we'd rather that was in the UK than it was elsewhere. So I absolutely understand it. The Society of Authors has put together a letter, which I've signed. I never signed open letters, but this I just thought, yeah, listen, we've all been robbed from. And Kazu Ishiguro signed the letter. So I thought, well, if Kazu Ishiguro is signing a letter, then I'm going to sign it as well. But what can they do? What can any of us do apart from try and put a bit of pressure on the government? The case that's proceeding through the US courts is significant. And clearly, it's only because of discovery during that case that we know about this.

16:12Would you consider being part of a sort of class action here? Yeah, of course. You signed a note for a letter now. That's a gateway drug. I signed a note for a letter. It's a good thing now. But what's the end game? You know, they are not going to pay a significant amount of copyright money to, you know, half a million different authors. You know, that's not going to happen. so what is it that we can do you know I would be comfortable if you know we were able to sue and get a very very large amount of money which goes into some sort of trust some sort of charitable trust and you know work for authors and work for the you know people trying to get into the publishing industry you know something some big kind of amount of money that could do some good but we have watched this space and you know anyone who is interested you know do get in touch with us but it feels like an impossible task I would say.

16:58But yeah, you know, just like someone who goes into a bank with a gun and steals a load of money. I mean, that's what someone has done. I'm aware that copyright theft is different to bank robbery. I'm using it as a hypothetical example. Let's chase the bank robbers. And, you know, I'm listening. I'm very, very comfortable with late stage capitalism. You know, always have been. I mean, that's, you know, I've, my whole life has been spent, you know, working in places where there's IP and there's copyright and all that stuff. And I've exploited my own stuff, you know, many times. I'm happy to do it.

17:28I understand how people do it. I understand how the industry works. I get all of that stuff. Well, we have got something celebratory you'll be glad to hear. After the break. Combinatory after the break. Should we go to some adverts? Yeah, let's do that. Come on, capitalism. Do your best. This episode is brought to you by Sky, where you can watch unmissable shows, which includes the new season of the multiple Emmy Award winning Hacks, starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. We love Hacks so much. Absolutely love it. I'm so looking forward to this new series. For people who don't know Hacks Marina, talk us through it a little bit.

17:58It's focused on the relationship between the older comedian who's played by Jean Smart, Deborah Vance, who's one of those real old showbiz troopers. She plays Vega. She does residency. She's sort of, yeah, almost like a Joan Rivers-y type character. Exactly. Old school. She's the boomer. And Hannah Einbinder is a kind of Gen Z-er. It's really interesting on the stuff between the ages. Yeah, so she plays Ava Daniels, who essentially becomes Deborah Vance's writer. So she writes for very cool, very hip things. Having sort of been cancelled for a joke at the start. So we start in the culture war and we continue in it.

18:31But what I love about the show particularly is the absolute reverence for comedy and the graft and the craft of it. And what a tough kind of man's world it remains. Definitely, definitely. And so how hard it is to be a woman in that male-dominated industry. Yeah, amazing on showbiz, amazing on comedy, amazing on the industry, but also just the relationship between the two of them is a really lovely generational sort of, it's like a sitcom thing. It's very dramatic, but a lot of comedy in there as well. They've got some terrific gas stars in this season. They've got Helen Hunt, Tony Goldwyn, Eric Balfour and obviously the returning cast who are peerless.

19:07Yep, the mix of comedy and drama is spot on. You can watch season four of the Emmy Award winning Hacks right now on Sky.

19:21Welcome back, everybody. Now, as promised, we would love to celebrate something which is something of a hit for Amazon Prime. Last One Laughing. Last One Laughing. The world of comedy entertainment has been absolutely eviscerated recently. It was one of the areas that's absolutely disappeared. Panel shows, those sorts of things have absolutely gone. And Amazon launched Last One Laughing. And yet it is a palpable hit. It's a format where essentially you must not laugh. They put a selection of comedians, and by the way, the cast list is incredible, in a sort of studio house, as it were, for, we'll come to this bit, because this is genius, for honestly like half a day.

20:03Yes, six hours. And they've got six episodes out of this. And the point is not to laugh. And they have to do various turns, they're involved in various challenges, and they're not allowed to laugh at each other. and this is extremely difficult because people like Bob Mortimer, Richard Ioward, Dave Eamon, Lou Sanders. They can't not be funny. What's wonderful about it, actually, first of all, you're right, it's a new way of using comedians in a way that we haven't seen before. It throws up all these pairings that you haven't seen before. I mean, I would now take a Richard Ioward and Bob Mortimer, Buddy, anything.

20:40Could be a cop show. Just whatever they want to put them into. It's absolutely brilliant. But this is based on a format that's been around a long time, right? It's been really successful all around the world. It's a show originally called Last One Laughing. It originally had the title Hitoshi Matsumoto Presents Documental, which they changed the title for the UK. From the Japanese one, that's good. So that's a Japanese show. The format, very, very similar. Funny people, six hours, a few tasks, a few challenges. Last one who doesn't laugh wins. It has been enormously successful around the world, this show.

21:13It's become Last One Laughing in Australia and Canada and Ireland and all sorts of places in 23 territories. But Amazon Prime decided to do the UK version of it. And it's definitely a punt. You know, there's been all sorts of these shows that have come out and done nothing. But the top 10 in streaming this week is all four episodes of Adolescence and six episodes of Last One Laughing. There might be a Reacher in there as well. It's an antidote to Adolescence, I would say. It's one of those shows that in certain territories has not worked at all. and in certain territories, Italy is a very good example, it's huge.

21:46And in the UK, it's become huge as well. And that all comes down to how well it is made. This one is just so beautifully put together. It's made by Zepatron and Initial. And Zepatron and some of the gang there, Ruth Phillips, Chris Cohen, Richard Cohen, who've made Cats Does Countdown, Would I Like To You, those shows, they know what they're doing. They're trusted by this group of people, which is why you've got such a great cast. The cast is absolutely A-list. It is. So Jimmy Carr is hosting with Roisin Conaty. And they've gone for the rather likeable, silly side of comedy. People who actually are funny in normal, everyday conversation.

22:23And people who they know can make each other laugh as well. It's sort of amazing because actually the circuit can be so hateful. Yes. And they all really love and respect each other. But imagine they think, oh my God, you're going to be such a problem because I'm just not going to be able to keep this great face. There's wonderful things all the way through where Bob Mortimer will start a conversation with Lou Sanders saying Lou has to walk away because she knows he's trying to... There's so much walking away, yeah. Because they're all trying to get each other to laugh all the way through. But what happens when you get a very smart production company like Zepatron and Initial who make it?