Congratulations to Jackie G. from Hartford, CT, and Casey H. from Pasadena, CA, for winning this week’s Free Book Contest. Signed copies of City of Stones, the latest in the Matt Jones thriller series, are on their way.
This contest has been running on the 1st & 15th of each month since Aug 2018. To enter, please visit https://www.robertellis.net and leave us a note.
City of Stones on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08Z23T8CQ/
ROBERT ELLIS WRITERS BLOG
04/01/2025
Meta/Facebook/Mark Zuckerburg pirated millions of books
Last week The Atlantic published a search tool that allows authors to check if their works are in LibGen, an illegal pirate site AI companies copied for their AI systems. The list has more than 7.5 million books that were copied by Meta and other AI companies.
All of my novels were pirated without permission, notice or any payment whatsoever. In the spirit of writers-have-to-eat-too-including me-myself-and-I, and I-never-met-anyone-in-big-tech-who-was-cool, I wasn’t even offered a share in Meta or any AI company for the contribution I made but didn’t agree to.
Here are key links writers and readers might be interested in:
The Authors Guild – What Authors Need to Know
https://authorsguild.org/news/meta-libgen-ai-training-book-heist-what-authors-need-to-know/
The Atlantic – Article
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/
The Atlantic Search Tool
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/
Hope this helps.
ROBERT ELLIS WRITERS BLOG
03/23/2025
