Richard Osman has said that writers will “have a good go” at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.

“Copyright law is not complicated at all,” the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. “If you want to use an author’s work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you’re breaking the law. It’s so simple.”

In January, it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of The Library Genesis dataset, a “shadow library” that originated in Russia and contains more than 7.5m books. In 2024 a New York federal court ordered LibGen’s anonymous operators to pay a group of publishers $30m (£24m) in damages for copyright infringement. Last week, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen. In response, authors and writers’ organisations have rallied against Meta’s use of copyrighted works.

“It’ll be incredibly difficult for us, and for other affected industries, to take on Meta, but we’ll have a good go!” said Osman.

Fellow authors expressed support for his statement. “THANK YOU! You are right,” wrote the novelist Alice Jolly. “We need to fight – now. Our work has been stolen. There are laws to protect us against this and they need to be enforced. Six of my books have been stolen. That’s my life’s work.”

Many writers posted screenshots of their books appearing in the LibGen database. “91 results,” wrote novelist Emma Donoghue. “That’s every book I’ve published since 1993, in multiple languages, scraped without permission to train AI. They’re robbing us in hopes of replacing us.”

“As a matter of urgency, Meta needs to compensate the rights holders of all the works it has been exploiting,” the Society of Authors said in a statement. “This is yet more evidence of the catastrophic impact generative AI is having on our creative industries worldwide.”

“From development through to output, creators’ rights are being ignored, and governments need to intervene to protects authors’ rights,” the trade union added. “In the UK, and globally, we need to see strong legislation from governments to uphold and strengthen copyright law, ensure transparency and fair payment, and to penalise big tech companies who ride roughshod over the law.”

In January, a court filing by a group of authors suing Meta for copyright infringement – which includes Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jacqueline Woodson, Andrew Sean Greer, Junot Diaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman – says that company executives, including Zuckerberg, were aware that LibGen is a pirated database.

Quoting from Meta internal communications, the filing claims that company engineers discussed accessing LibGen data but hesitated to start because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right [grinning face emoji]”.

A Meta spokesperson told the Guardian that 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,” the spokesperson added. “We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves and to protect the development of GenAI for the benefit of all.”

Last week also saw the academic publisher Taylor & Francis announcing plans to use AI to translate books “that would otherwise be unavailable to English-language readers”. All AI-translated manuscripts “will be copy-edited and then reviewed by Taylor & Francis editors and the books’ authors before publication”, said the publisher.

“How will authors check translations into other languages?” wrote the author and illustrator Oisín McGann in response to the news on BlueSky. “Do they get paid for the work? Do they have to pay a translator?”

This follows the Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning – the largest in the Netherlands – saying it is “using AI to assist in the translation of a limited number of books” last November. “Taking the translator out of the loop opens the door to incorrect or misleading translations that will serve readers poorly,” said the translator David McKay at the time.